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Title: The Romance of His Life
And Other Romances
Author: Mary Cholmondeley
Release Date: October 5, 2012 [eBook #40947]
Language: English
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THE ROMANCE OF HIS LIFE
And Other Romances
* * * * *
_By MARY CHOLMONDELEY_
NOTWITHSTANDING: A Novel.
MOTH AND RUST: together with GEOFFREY'S WIFE and THE PITFALL.
THE LOWEST RUNG: together with THE HAND ON THE LATCH, ST. LUKE'S
SUMMER AND THE UNDERSTUDY.
UNDER ONE ROOF: A Family Record.
LONDON: JOHN MURRAY.
* * * * *
THE ROMANCE OF HIS LIFE
And Other Romances
by
MARY CHOLMONDELEY
Author of "Red Pottage."
London
John Murray, Albemarle Street W.
1921
TO
PERCY LUBBOCK
Contents
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 11
THE ROMANCE OF HIS LIFE 25
THE DARK COTTAGE 55
THE GHOST OF A CHANCE 83
THE GOLDFISH 109
THE STARS IN THEIR COURSES 146
HER MURDERER 173
VOTES FOR MEN 200
THE END OF THE DREAM 216
Introduction
IN PRAISE OF A SUFFOLK COTTAGE
Most of these stories were written in a cottage in Suffolk.
For aught I know to the contrary there may be other habitable dwellings
in that beloved country of grey skies and tidal rivers, and cool sea
breezes. There certainly are other houses in our own village, some
larger, some smaller than mine, where pleasant neighbours manage to eat
and sleep, and to eke out their existence. But, of course, though they
try to hide it, they must all be consumed with envy of me, for a cottage
to equal mine I have never yet come across, nor do I believe in its
existence.
Everyone has a so-called cottage nowadays. But fourteen years ago when I
fell desperately in love with mine they were not yet the rage. The
fashion was only beginning.
Now we all know that it is a parlous affair to fall in love in middle
age. Christina Rossetti goes out of her way to warn us against these
dangerous grey haired attachments.
She says:
"Keep love for youth, and violets for the spring."
I had often read those beautiful lines and thought how true they were,
but I paid no more attention to their prudent advice the moment my
emotions were stirred than a tourist does to the word "Private" on a
gate.
It amazes me to recall that the bewitching object of my affections had
actually stood, forlorn, dishevelled, and untenanted, for more than a
year before I set my heart upon it, and the owner good naturedly gave me
a long lease of it.
Millionaires would tumble over each other to secure it now. This paper
is written partly in order to make millionaires uneasy, for I have a
theory, no, more than a theory, a conviction that they seldom obtain the
pick of the things that make life delightful.
Do you remember how the ex-Kaiser, even in his palmy days, never could
get hot buttered toast unless his daughter's English governess made it
for him, and later on chronicled the fact for the British public.
There are indications that a few millionaires and crowned heads have
dimly felt for some time past the need of cottages, but Royalty has not
yet got any nearer to one than that distressful eyesore at Kew with tall
windows, which I believe Queen Caroline built, and which Queen Victoria
bequeathed to the nation as "a thing of beauty."
* * * * *
One of the many advantages of a cottage is that the front door always
stands open unless it is wet, and as the Home Ruler and I sit at
breakfast in the tiny raftered hall we see the children running to
school, and the cows coming up the lane, and Mrs. _A's_ washing wending
its way towards her in a wheelbarrow, and Mrs. _M's_ pony and cart _en
route_ for Woodbridge. That admirable pony brings us up from the
station, and returns there for our heavy luggage, it fetches groceries,
it snatches "prime joints" from haughty butchers. It is, as someone has
truly said, "our only link with the outer world."
The village life flows like a little stream in front of us as we sip our
coffee at our small round mahogany table with a mug of flaming Siberian
wallflower on it, the exact shade of the orange curtains. Of course if
you have orange curtains you are bound to grow flowers of the same
colour.
The passers by also see us, but that is a sight to which they are as
well accustomed as to the village pump, the stocks at the Church gate,
or any other samples of "still life." They take no more heed of us than
the five young robins, who fly down from the nest in the honeysuckle
over the porch, and bicker on the foot scraper.
* * * * *
The black beam that stretches low over our heads across the little room
has a carved angel at each end, brought by the Home Ruler in pre-war
days from Belgium; and, in the middle of the beam, is a hook from which
at night a lantern is suspended, found in a curiosity shop in Kent. My
nephew, aged seven, watched me as I cautiously bought it, and whispered
to his mother:
"Why does Aunt Mary buy the lantern when, for thirty shillings, she
could get a model engine?"
"Well, you see she does not want a model engine, and she does want a
lantern, and it is not wrong of her to buy it as she has earned the
money."
Shrill amazement of nephew.
"_What!_ Aunt Mary earned thirty shillings! How she must have _sweated_
to make as much as that!"
* * * * *
I must tell you that our cottage was once two cottages. That is why it
looks so long and pretty from the lane, pushing back the roses from its
eyes as it peers at you over its wooden fence. Consequently we have two
green front doors exactly alike, and each approached by a short brick
path edged with clipped box. Each path has its own little green wooden
gate. One of these doors has had a panel taken out by the Home Ruler,
and a wire grating stretched over the opening, as she has converted the
passage within into a larder.
Now, would you believe it? Chauffeurs, after drawing up magnificent
motors in front of the house, actually go and beat upon the _larder_
door, when, if they would only look through the iron grating, they
would see a leg of mutton hanging up within an inch of their noses--that
is in pre-war days: of course now only sixpenny worth of bones, and a
morsel of liver.
And all the time we are waiting to admit our guests at the _other_ door,
the _open_ door, the _hall_ door, the _front_ door, with an old brass
knocker on it, and an electric bell, and a glimpse within of a table
laid for luncheon, with an orange table cloth--to match the curtains!
I have no patience with chauffeurs. They observe nothing.
That reminds me that a friend of ours, with that same chauffeur, was
driving swiftly in her car the other day, and ran into a butcher's boy
on his bicycle. As I have already remarked, chauffeurs never recognize
meat when they see it unless it is on a plate. The boy was knocked over.
My friend saw the overturned bicycle in the ditch; and a string of
sausages festooned on the hedge, together with a piece of ribs of beef,
and a pound of liver caught on a sweet-briar, and imagined that they
were the scattered internal fittings of the butcher's boy, until he
crawled out from under the car uninjured. She did not recover from the
shock for several days.
* * * * *
To return to the cottage. I am not going to pretend that it had no
drawbacks. There were painful surprises, especially in the honeymoon
period of my affections. Most young couples, if they were honest, which
they never are, would admit that they emerged stunned, if not partially
paralysed, from the strain of the first weeks of wedded life. I was
stunned, but I remembered it was the common lot and took courage. Yes,
there were painful surprises. Ants marched up in their cohorts between
the bricks in the pantry floor. When we enquired into this phenomenon,
behold! there _was_ no floor. For a moment I was as "dumbfounded" as the
bridegroom who discovers a plait of hair on his bride's dressing table.
The bricks were laid in noble simplicity on Mother Earth, no doubt as in
the huts of our forefathers, in the days when they painted themselves
with wode, and skirmished with bows and arrows. I had to steel my heart
against further discoveries. Rats raced in battalions in the walls at
night. Plaster and enormous spiders dropped (not, of course in
collusion) from the ceilings in the dark. Upper floors gave signs of
collapse. Two rooms which had real floors, when thrown into one, broke
our hearts by unexpectedly revealing different levels. That really was
not playing fair.
Frogs, large, active, shiny Suffolk frogs had a passion for leaping in
at the drawing room windows in wet weather. The frogs are my department,
for the Home Ruler, who fears neither God nor man, hides her face in her
hands and groans when the frogs bound in across the matting; and I, _moi
qui vous parle_, I pursue them with the duster, which, in every well
organised cottage, is in the left hand drawer of the writing table.
The great great grandchildren of the original jumpers, jump in to this
day, in spite of the severity with which they and their ancestors from
one generation to another have been gathered up in dusters, and cast
forth straddling and gasping on to the lawn. Frogs seem as unteachable
as chauffeurs!
* * * * *
Very early in the day we realised that in the principal bedroom a rich
penetrating aroma of roast hare made its presence felt the moment the
window was shut. Why this was so I do not know. The room was not over
the kitchen. We have never had a hare roasted on the premises during all
the years we have lived in that delectable place. We have never even
partaken of jugged hare within its walls. But the fact remains: when the
window is shut the hare steals back into the room. Perhaps it is a
ghost!!!
I never thought of that till this moment. I feel as if I had read
somewhere about a ghost which always heralds its approach by a smell of
musk. And then I remember also hearing about an old woman who after her
death wanted dreadfully to tell her descendants that she had hidden the
lost family jewels in the chimney. But though she tried with all her
might to warn them she never got any nearer to it than by appearing as
a bloodhound at intervals. Everyone who saw her was terrified, and the
jewels remained in the chimney.
Is it possible that I have not taken this aroma of roast hare
sufficiently seriously! Perhaps it is a portent. Perhaps it is an
imperfect manifestation--like the bloodhound--of someone on the other
side who is trying to confide in me.
* * * * *
Yes, we sustained shocks not a few, but there was in store for us at any
rate one beautiful surprise which made up for them all.
One bedroom (the one with the hare in it, worse luck) possessed an oak
floor, fastened with the original oak pins. It had likewise a Tudor
door, but the rest of the chamber was commonplace with oddly bulging
walls, covered with a garish flowery wallpaper.
We stripped it off. There was another underneath it. There always is. We
stripped that off, then another, and another, and yet another. (The
reader will begin to think the roast hare is not so mysterious after
all.)
We got down at last to that incredibly ugly paper which in my childhood
adorned every cottage bedroom I visited in my native Shropshire. Do you
know it, reader, a realistic imitation of brickwork? It seems to have
spread itself over Suffolk as well as the Midlands.
After stripping off seven papers the beautiful upright beams revealed
themselves, and the central arch, all in black oak like the floor.
We whitewashed the plaster between the beams, scratched the beams
themselves till they were restored to their natural colour, and rejoiced
exceedingly. We rejoice to this day.
But the hare is still there.
* * * * *
Our cottage is on the edge of a little wood. Great forest trees stand
like sentinels within a stone's throw of the house. In front of the
drawing room windows is a tiny oasis of mown lawn, bounded by a low wall
clambered over by humps of jasmine and montana, and that loveliest of
single roses scinica anemone. The low wall divides the mown grass from
the rough broken ground which slopes upwards behind it till it loses
itself among the tree trunks. Here tall families of pink and white
foxgloves and great yellow lupins jostle each other, and it is all the
Home Ruler can do to keep the peace between them, and to persuade them
to abide in their respective places between stretches of shining ground
ivy and blue periwinkle; all dappled and checkered by the shadows of the
over-arching trees.
If you walk down that narrow path between the leaning twisted hollies
you come suddenly upon an opening in the thicket, and a paved path leads
you into another little garden.
This also has its bodyguard of oaks and poplars on the one side, and on
the other the high hedge dividing it from the lane, over which tilt the
red roofs of the cottages.
Within the enclosure a family of giant docks spread themselves in the
long grass, and ancient fruit trees sprawl on their hands and knees,
each with a rose tree climbing over its ungainliness, making a low inner
barrier between the tall trees, and the little low-lying burnished
garden in the midst. Here ranged and grouped colonies of rejoicing
plants follow each other into flower in an ordered sequence, all
understood and cherished by the earth-ingrained hands of the Home Ruler.
Some few disappointments there are, but many successes. Wire worm may
get in. Cuttings may "damp off." Brompton stocks may not always "go
through the winter." But the flowers respond in that blessed little
place. They do their best, for the best has been done for them. If it is
essential to their well being that their feet should be shaded from the
sun, their feet _are_ shaded, by some well-bred low growing plant in
front of them, which does not interfere with them. If they need the
morning sun they are placed where its rays can pour upon them.
It is a garden of vivid noonday sunshine, when we sit and bask among the
rock pinks on the central bit of brickwork; and of long velvet afternoon
shadows: a garden of quiet conversation, and peaceful intercourse, and
of endless, endless loving labour in sun and rain.
I contribute the quiet conversation, and the Home Ruler contributes the
loving labour; and, while we thus each do our share, the manifold
voices of the village reach us through the tall hedge: the cries of the
children playing by the bridge, the thin complaint of the goats, the
jingle of harness, and the thud of ponderous slow stepping hoofs, the
whistle of the lad sitting sideways on the leading horse; all the
_paisible rumeur_ of the pleasant communal life of which we are a part.
* * * * *
Our village is not really called Riff. It has a beautiful and ancient
name, which I shall not disclose, but I don't mind telling you that it
is close to Mouse Hold,[1] a hamlet in the boggy meadows beyond the
Deben; and not so very far from Gobblecock Hall. Of course if you are
not Suffolk born and bred you will think I am trying to be humourous and
that I have invented this interesting old English name. I can only say.
Look in any good map of Suffolk. You will find Gobblecock Hall on it
near the coast. Riff is only a few miles from Kesgrave Church, where you
can still see the tombstone of the gipsy queen in the churchyard. The
father of one of the oldest inhabitants of Riff witnessed the immense
concourse of gipsies who attended the funeral.
[1] Probably originally Morass Hold.
Riff is within an easy walk of Boulge, where Fitzgerald lies under his
little Persian rose tree, covered in summer with tiny yellow roses. You
see how central Riff is. And, if you cross the Deben, and walk steadily
up the low hill to that broomy, gorsy, breezy upland, Bromswell Heath,
then you stand on the very spot where, a little over a hundred years
ago, British troops were encamped to await Napoleon. And a few years ago
our soldiers assembled there once more to resist the invasion which
Kitchener at any rate expected, and which it now seems evident Germany
intended.
* * * * *
We in Riff learned the meaning of war early in the day. Which of us will
forget the first Zeppelin raid, and later on the sight of torn,
desolated Woodbridge the day after it was bombed: the terrified blanched
faces peeping out from the burst doorways, the broken smoking buildings,
the high piles of shredded matchwood that had been houses yesterday, the
blank incredulous faces of friends and neighbours. No doubt our faces
were as incredulous as those we saw around us. It seemed as if it could
not, could not be! We had seen photographs of similar havoc in Belgium
and France, but Woodbridge! our own Woodbridge, that pleasant shopping
town on its tidal river with the wild swans on it. _It could not be!_
But so it was.
Yes, the war reached us early, and it left us late. Riff suffered as
every other village in Great Britain suffered. Our ruddy cheerful lads
went out one after another. Twenty-two came back no more.
As the years passed we became inured to raids. Nevertheless, just as we
remember the first, so all of us at Riff remember the last in the small
hours of Sunday morning, June 17th, 1917.
I was awakened as often before, by what seemed at first a distant
thunderstorm, at about 3 o'clock in the morning.
I got up and went downstairs in the dark. By this time the bombs were
falling nearer and nearer. As I felt my way down the narrow staircase it
seemed as if the trembling walls were no stronger than paper. The
cottage shook and shook as in a palsy, and C. and E. and I took refuge
in the garden. M. kept watch in the lane. It was, as far as I could see,
pitch dark, but their younger eyes descried, though mine did not, the
wounded Zeppelin lumber heavily over us inland, throwing out its bombs.
Our ears were deafened by the sharp rat-tat-tat of the machine guns, and
by our own frantic anti-aircraft fire. In that pandemonium we stood, how
long I know not, unaware that a neighbour's garden was being liberally
plastered by our own shrapnel. Then, for the second time, the stricken
airship blundered over us, this time in the direction of the sea.
When it had passed overhead we groped our way through the cottage, and
came out on its eastern side. A mild light met our eyes. The dawn was at
hand. It trembled, flushed and stainless as the heart of a wild rose,
behind the black clustered roofs of the village, and the low church
tower.
And above the roofs, some miles away, outlined against the sky, hung the
crippled Zeppelin, motionless, tilted. We watched it fascinated. Slowly
we saw it right itself, and begin to move. It headed towards the coast,
but it could only flee into its worst enemy--the dawn. It travelled, it
dwindled. The sea haze began to enfold it. The clamour of our gun fire
suddenly ceased. It toiled like a wounded sea bird towards its only
hope--the sea.
As we watched it fierce wings whirred unseen overhead. Our aeroplanes
had taken up the chase.
The Zeppelin travelled, travelled.
_What was that?_
A spark of light appeared upon it. It stretched, it leaped into a great
flame. The long body of the Zeppelin was seen to be alight from end to
end.
Then rose simultaneously from every throat in Riff a shout of triumph,
the shrill cries of the children joining with the voices of the elders.
And, after that one cry, silence fell upon us, as we watched that
towering furnace of flame, freighted with agony, sink slowly to the
earth. At last it sank out of sight, leaving a pillar of smoke to mark
its passing.
So windless was the air that the smoke remained like some solemn
upraised finger pointing from earth to heaven.
No one stirred. No one spoke. The light grew. And, in the silence of our
awed hearts, a cuckoo near at hand began calling gently to the new day,
coming up in peace out of the shining east.
The Romance of His Life
I have always believed that the exact moment when the devil entered into
Barrett was four forty-five p.m. on a certain June afternoon, when he
and I were standing at Parker's door in the court at ----s. He says
himself that he was as pure as snow till that instant, and that if the
_entente cordiale_ between himself and that very interesting and
stimulating personality had not been established he is convinced he
would either have died young of excessive virtue, or have become a
missionary. I don't know about that. I only know the consequences of the
_entente_ aged me. But then Barrett says I was born middle-aged like
Maitland himself, the hero of this romance, if so it can be called.
Barrett calls it a romance. I call it--I don't know what to call it, but
it covers me with shame whenever I think of it.
Barrett says that shame is a very wholesome discipline, a great
eye-opener and brain stretcher, and one he has unfortunately never had
the benefit of, so he feels it a duty to act so as to make the
experience probable in the near future.
On this particular afternoon we had both just bicycled back together
from lunching with Parker's aunt at Ely, and she had given me a great
bunch of yellow roses for Parker and a melon, and we were to drop them
at Parker's. And here we were at Parker's, and apparently he was out or
asleep, and not to be waked by Barrett's best cat-call. And as we stood
at his door, Barrett clutching the melon, I found the roses were not in
my hand. Where on earth had I put them down? At Maitland's door,
perhaps, where we had run up expecting to find him, or at Bradley's,
where we had stopped a moment. Neither of us could remember.
I was just going back for them when whom should we see coming sailing
across the court in cap and gown but old Maitland in his best attitude,
chin up, book in hand, signet ring showing.
Parker's aunt used to chaff us for calling him old, and said we thought
everyone of forty-five was tottering on the brink of the tomb. And so
they mostly are, I think, if they are Dons. I have heard other men who
have gone down say that you leave them tottering, and you come back ten
years later and there they are, still tottering.
Barrett said Maitland did everything as if his portrait was being taken
doing it, and that his effect on others was never absent from his mind.
I don't know about that, but certainly in his talk he was always trying
to impress on us his own aspect of himself.
If it was a fine morning and he wished to be thought to be enjoying it,
he would rub his hands and say there was not a happier creature on God's
earth than himself. He pined to be thought unconventional, and after
drawing our attention to some microscopic delinquency, he would regret
that there had been no fairy godmother at hand at his christening to
endow him with a proper deference for social conventions. If he gave a
small donation to any college scheme the success of which was not
absolutely assured, he would shake his head and say: "I know very well
that all you youngsters laugh in your sleeve at the way I lead forlorn
hopes, but it is a matter of temperament. I can't help it."
The personal reminiscences with which his conversation was liberally
strewed were ingeniously calculated to place him in a picturesque light.
Parker's aunt says that stout men are more in need of a picturesque
light than thin ones. Maitland certainly was stout and short, with a
thick face and no neck, and a perfectly round head, set on his shoulders
like an ill-balanced orange, or William Tell's apple. We should never
have noticed what he looked like if it had not been for his illusion
that he was irresistible to the opposite sex; at least, he was always
adroitly letting drop things which showed, if you put two and two
together, and he never made the sum very difficult--what ravages he
inadvertently made in feminine bosoms, how careful he was, how careful
he had _learnt_ to be not to raise expectations. He was always
pathetically anxious to impress on us that he had given a good deal of
pain. But whether it was really an hallucination on his part that he was
hopelessly adored by women, or whether the hallucination consisted in
the belief that he had succeeded in convincing his little college world
of his powers of fascination, I cannot tell you. I don't pretend to know
everything like Barrett.
Parker's aunt told Parker in confidence, who told Barrett and me in
confidence, that she had once, on his own suggestion, asked Maitland to
tea, but had never repeated the invitation, though he told her
repeatedly that he frequently passed her door on the way to the
cathedral, because he had hinted to mutual friends that a devoted
friendship was, alas! all he felt able to give in that quarter, but was
not what was desired by that charming lady.
And now here was Maitland advancing towards us with one of Parker's
aunt's yellow roses in his buttonhole.
We both instantly realised what had happened. I had left the roses at
his door by mistake. How gratified she would be when she heard of it!
I giggled.
"Don't say a word about them," hissed Barrett, her fervent admirer, as
Maitland came up to us.
"Won't you both come in to tea," he said genially. "Parker's out."
We left Parker's melon on his doorstep to chaperon itself, and turned
back with him. And sure enough, on his table was the bunch of roses.
"Glorious, aren't they?" said Maitland, waving his signet ring toward
them.
I do believe he had asked us in because of them. He loved cheap effects.
We both looked at them in silence.
"The odd thing is that they were left here without a line or a card or
anything while I was out."
"Then you don't know who sent them," said Barrett, casting a warning
glance at me.
"Well, yes and no. I don't actually know for certain, but I think I can
guess. I fancy I know my own faults as well as most men, and I flatter
myself I am not a coxcomb, but still--"
I giggled again. I should be disappointed in Parker, who was on very
easy terms with his aunt if he did not score off her before she was much
older.
"You are not, I hope, expecting me or even poor Jones (Jones is me) to
be so credulous as to believe a man sent them," said Barrett severely.
When Maitland was in what Barrett called his "conquering hero mood" he
did not resent these impertinences, at least not from Barrett. "If you
are, I must remind you that there are limits as to what even little
things like us can swallow."
"Barrett, you are incorrigible. _Cherchez la femme_," said Maitland with
evident gratification, counting spoonfuls of tea into the teapot. He
often said he liked keeping in touch with the young life of the
University. "One, two, three, and one for the pot. Just so! I don't set
up to be a lady-killer, but--"
"Oh! oh!" from Barrett.
"I'm a confirmed old bachelor, a grumpy, surly recluse wedded to my
pipe, but for all that I have eyes in my head. I know a pretty woman
from a plain one, I hope, even though I don't personally want to
"domesticate the recording angel."[2]
[2] I thought the recording angel funny at the time until Barrett
told me afterwards that it was cribbed from Rhoda Broughton.
"She'll land you yet unless you look out," said Barrett with decision.
"I foresee that I shall be supporting your faltering footsteps to the
altar in a month's time. She'll want a month to get her clothes. Is the
day fixed yet?"
"What nonsense you talk. I never met such a sentimentalist as you,
Barrett. I assure you I don't even know her name. But it has not been
possible for me to help observing that a lady, a very exquisite young
lady, has done me the honour to attend all my lectures, and to listen
with the most rapt attention to my poor words. And last time, only
yesterday, I noted the fact, ahem! that she wore a rose, a yellow rose,
presumably plucked from the same tree as these."
There were, I suppose, in our near vicinity, about a hundred and fifty
yellow rose trees in bloom at that moment. Barrett must have known that.
Nevertheless, he nodded his head and said gravely:
"That proves it."
On looking over these pages he affirms that this and not earlier was the
precise moment when the devil entered into him, supplying, as he says, a
long felt though unrealised want.
"I seldom look at my audience when I am lecturing," continued Maitland.
"I am too much engrossed with my subject. But I could not help noticing
her absorbed attention, so different from that of most women. Why they
come to lectures I don't know."
"I think I have seen the person you mean," said Barrett, in a perfectly
level voice. "I don't know who she is, but I saw her waiting under an
archway after chapel last Sunday evening. I noticed her because of her
extreme good looks. She was evidently watching for someone. When the
congregation had all passed out she turned away."
"I should have liked to thank her," said Maitland regretfully. "It
seems so churlish, so boorish, not to say a word. You have no idea who
she was?"
"None," said Barrett.
Shortly afterwards we took our leave, but not until Maitland had been
reminded by the lady's appearance of a certain charming woman of whom he
had seen a good deal at one time in years gone by, who, womanlike, had
been unable to understand the claims which the intellectual life make on
a man, and who had, in consequence, believed him cold and quarrelled
with him to his great regret, because it was impossible for him to dance
attendance on her as she expected, and as he would gladly have done had
he been a man of leisure. Having warned us young tyros against the
danger of frankness in all dealings with women, and how often it had got
him into hot water with the sex, he bade us good evening.
As we came out we saw across the court that the melon had been taken in,
so judged that Parker had returned. He had. We were so tickled by the
way Maitland had accounted for the roses that we quite forgot to score
off Parker about them, and actually told him what Maitland supposed.
Barrett then suggested that we should at once form a committee to
deliberate on the situation. Parker and I did not quite see why a
committee was necessary to laugh at old Maitland, but we agreed.
"Did you really see the woman he means, or were you only pulling
Maitland's leg?" I asked.
"I saw her all right," retorted Barrett. "Don't you remember, Parker,
how I nudged you when she passed."
Parker nodded.
"She was such a picture that I asked who she was, and found she was a
high school mistress, the niece of old Cooper, the vet. She is going to
be married to a schoolmaster, and go out to Canada with him. I don't
mind owning I was rather smitten myself, or I should not have taken the
trouble."
"She has left Cambridge," said Parker slowly. "When I got out of the
train half-an-hour ago she was getting in. Cooper was seeing her off."
"Oh, don't--don't tell poor old Maitland," I broke in. "Let him go on
holding out his chest and thinking she sent him the roses. It won't
matter to her, if she is off to Canada, and never coming back any more.
And it will do him such a lot of good."
"I don't mean to tell him--immediately," said Barrett ominously. "I
think with you he ought to have his romance. Now I know she is safely
gone forever, though I don't mind owning it gives me a twinge to think
she is throwing herself away on a schoolmaster: but as she really can't
come back and raise a dust, gentlemen, I lay a proposal before the
committee, that the lady who sent the roses should follow them up with
a little note."
The committee agreed unanimously, and we decided, at least Barrett
decided, that he should compose the letter, and Parker, who was rather
good at a feigned handwriting, should copy it out.
Parker and I wanted Barrett to make the letter rather warm, and saying
something complimentary about Maitland's appearance, but Barrett would
not hear of it. I did not see where the fun came in if it was just an
ordinary note, but Barrett was adamant. He said he had an eye on the
future.
He put his head in his hands, and thought a lot and then scribbled no
end, and then tore it up, and finally produced the stupidest little
commonplace letter you ever saw with simply nothing in it, saying how
much she had profited by his lectures and rot of that kind. I was
dreadfully disappointed, for I had always thought Barrett as clever as
he could stick. He said it was an awful grind for him to be commonplace
even for a moment, and that by rights I ought to have composed the
letter, but that it was no more use expecting anything subtle from me
than a Limerick from an archbishop.
He proceeded to read it aloud.
"But how is he to know it is the person who sent him the roses?" said
Parker, "and how is he to answer if she does not give him an address?
Hang it all. He ought to be able to answer. Give the poor devil a
chance."
"He shall be given every chance," said Barrett. "But don't you two prize
idiots see that we can't give a real name and address because he would
certainly go there?"
"Not a bit of it. He's as lazy as a pig. He never goes anywhere. He says
he hasn't time. He's been seccotined into his armchair for the last ten
years."
"I tell you he would go on all fours from here to Ely if he thought
there was the chance of a woman looking at him when he got there."
"Then how is he to answer?" said Parker, who always had to have
everything explained to him.
"I am just coming to that. I don't say anything in the note about the
roses, you observe. I am far too maidenly. But I just add one tiny
postscript:
'If you do not regard this little note as an unwarrantable
intrusion, please wear one of my roses on Sunday morning at chapel,
even if it is faded, as a sign that you have forgiven my presumption
in writing these few lines.'"
"That's not bad," said Parker suddenly.
"Now," said Barrett, tossing the sheet over to him, "you copy that out
in a fist that you can stick to, because it will be the first of a long
correspondence."
"We've not settled her name yet," I suggested.
"Maud," said Barrett with decision. "What else could it be?"
The letter was written on an unstamped sheet of paper, was carefully
directed--not quite correctly. Barrett insisted on that, and posted it
himself.
The following Sunday we were all in our places early, and sure enough,
Maitland, who came in more like a conquering hero than ever, was wearing
a faded yellow rose in his buttonhole. He touched it in an absent manner
once or twice during the service, and sat with his profile sedulously
turned toward the congregation. He was not quite so bad profile because
it did not show the bulging of his cheeks. As he came out he looked
about him furtively, almost shyly. He evidently feared she was not
there. Barrett and I joined him, and engaged him in conversation (though
we had some difficulty in dragging him from the chapel), in the course
of which he mentioned that he had intended to go to his sister at
Newmarket for Sunday, but a press of work had obliged him to give up his
visit at the last moment.
Poor Maitland! When he left us that morning, and Barrett and I looked at
each other, I felt a qualm of pity for him. I knew how ruthless Barrett
was, and that he was doomed.
But if I realised Barrett's ruthlessness, I had not realised his
cunning. His next move was masterly, though I did not think so at the
time. He was as cautious and calculating as if his life depended on it.
He got some note-paper with a little silver M. on a blue lozenge on it
and wrote another note. He was going to Farnham for a few days to stay
with his eldest brother, who was quartered there. And in this note
Maud--Maitland's Maud as we now called her--diffidently ventured to ask
for elucidation on one or two points of the lectures which had proved
too abstruse for her feminine intellect. She showed considerable
intelligence for a woman, and real knowledge of the lectures--I did that
part--and suggested that as her letters, if addressed to her, were apt
to go to her maiden aunt of the same name with whom she was staying, and
who was a very old-fashioned person, totally opposed to the higher
education of women--that if he was so good as to find time to answer her
questions it would be best to direct to her at the Post Office, Farnham,
under her initials M.M., where she could easily send for them.
I betted a pound to a penny that Maitland would not rise to this bait,
and Barrett took it. I told him you could see the hook through the worm.
Parker was uneasy, even when Barrett had explained to him that it was
impossible for us to get into trouble in the matter.
"You always say that," said Parker, with harrowing experiences in the
back-ground of his mind.
"Well, I say it again. I know your powers of obtruding yourself on the
notice of the authorities, but how do even you propose to wedge yourself
into a scrape on this occasion? With all your gifts in that line you
simply can't do it."
Parker ruminated.
"Ought we to--"
"Ought we to what?"
"To pull his leg to such an extent? Isn't it taking rather a--rather
a--er responsibility?"
"Responsibility sits as lightly on me as dew upon the rose," said
Barrett. "You copy out that."
Parker copied it out and Barrett went off to Farnham. A few days later
he re-appeared. I was smoking in Parker's room when he came in.
He sat down under the lamp, drew a fat letter from his waistcoat pocket,
and read it aloud to us. It was Maitland's answer.
It really was a ghastly letter, the kind of literary preachy rot which
you read in a book, which I never thought people really wrote, not even
people like Maitland, who seem to live in a world of shams. It was
improving and patronising and treacly, and full of information, partly
about the lectures, but mostly about himself. He came out in a very
majestic light you may be sure of that. And at the end he begged her not
to hesitate to write to him again if he could be of the least use to
her, that busy as he undoubtedly was, his college work never seemed in
his eyes as important as real human needs.
"He's cribbed that out of a book," interrupted Parker. "Newby the tutor
in 'Belchamber,' who is a most awful prig, says those very words."
"Prigs all say the same things," said Barrett airily. "If Maitland read
'Belchamber,' he would think Newby was a caricature of him. He'd _never_
believe that he was plagiarising Newby. The cream of the letter is still
to come," and he went on reading.
Maitland patted the higher education of women on the head, and half
hinted at a meeting, and then withdrew it again, saying that some of the
difficulties in her mind, which he recognised to be one of a high order,
might be more easily eliminated verbally, and that he should be at
Farnham during the vacation, but that he feared his stay would be brief,
and his time was hopelessly bespoken beforehand, etc., etc.
"He might be an Adonis," said Parker. "He'll be coy and virginal next."
"He'll be a lot of things before long," said Barrett grimly. "Get out
your inkpot, Parker. I'm going to have another shy at him."
"You're _not_ going to suggest a meeting! For goodness sake, Barrett, be
careful. You will be saying Jones must dress up as a woman next."
"Well, if he does, I won't," I said. "I simply won't."
I had taken a good many parts in University plays.
"The sight of Jones as a female would make any man's gorge rise," said
Barrett contemptuously. "I know I had to shut my eyes when I made love
to him at 'The Footlights' last year. I never knew two such victims of
hysteria as you and Jones. Suggest a meeting! Maud suggest a meeting!
What do you know of women! I tell you two moral lepers, unfit to tie the
shoestring of a pure woman like Maud, that it takes a Galahad like me to
deal with a situation of this kind. What you've got to remember is that
I'm not trying to entangle him."
Cries of "Oh! Oh!" from the Committee.
"I mean Maud isn't. I am, but that's another thing. You two wretched,
whited sepulchres haven't got hold of the true inwardness of Maud's
character. Your gross, assignating minds don't apprehend her. Maud is
just one of those golden-haired, white-handed angels who go through life
girthing up a man's ideals; who exist only in the imagination of elderly
men like Maitland, who has never seen a woman in his life, and who does
not know that unless they are imbeciles they draw the line at drivel
like that letter. Bless her! _She's_ not going to suggest a meeting.
He'll do that and enjoy doing it. Can't you see Maitland in his new role
of ruthless pursuer--the relentless male? No more easy conquests for
him, sitting in his college chair, mowing them all down like a Maxim as
far as--Ely. He's got to _work_ this time. I tell you two miserable
poltroons that this is going to make a man of Maitland. He's been an old
woman long enough."
"All I can say is," said Parker, ignoring the allusion to Ely, "that if
the Almighty hasn't a sense of humour you will find yourself in a tight
place some day, Barrett."
My pen fails me to record the diabolical manner in which Barrett played
with his victim. It would have been like a cat and mouse if you can
imagine the mouse throwing his chest out and fancying himself all the
time. Barrett inveigled Maitland into going to Farnham, and accounted
somehow for Maud's non-appearance at the interview coyly deprecated by
Maud, and consequently hotly demanded by Maitland. He actually made him
shave off his moustache. Parker and I lost heavily on that. We each bet
a fiver that Barrett would never get it off. It was a beastly moustache
which would have made any decent woman ill to look at. It did not turn
up at the ends like Barrett's elder brother's, but grew over his mouth
like hart's tongue hanging over a well. You could see his teeth through
it. Horrible it was. But you can't help how your hair grows, so I'm not
blaming Maitland, and it was better gone. But we never thought Barrett
would have done it. I must own my opinion of him rose.
And he kept it up all through the long vacation with a pertinacity I
should never have given him credit for. He took an artistic pride in it,
and the letters were first rate. I did not think so at first; I thought
them rather washy until I saw how they took. Barrett said what Maitland
needed was a milk and water diet. He seemed to know exactly the kind of
letter that would fetch a timid old bachelor. But it was not all "beer
and skittles" for Barrett. He sorely wanted to make Maud stand up to him
once or twice, and put her foot through his mild platitudes. He wrote
one or two capital letters in a kind of rage, but he always groaned and
tore them up afterward.
"If Maud has any character whatever," he sometimes said, "if she shows
the least sign of seeing him except as he shows himself to her, if she
has any interest in life beyond his lectures, he will feel she is not
suited to him, and he will give his bridle-reins--I mean his waterproof
spats--a shake, and adieu for evermore."
Barrett eventually lured Maitland into deep water, long past the bathing
machine of adieu forevermore, as he called it. When he was too
cock-o-hoop, we reminded him that, after all, he was only one of a
committee, and that he had been immensely helped by the young woman
herself. She really looked such a saint, and as innocent as a pigeon's
egg.
But Barrett stuck to it that her appearance ought, on the contrary, to
have warned Maitland off, and that he was an infernal ass to think such
an exquisite creature as that would give a second thought to a stout old
bachelor of forty-five, looking exactly like a cod that had lain too
long on the slab. I could not see that Maitland was so very like a cod,
but there was a vindictiveness about Barrett's description of him that I
really think must have been caused by his romantic admiration of
Parker's aunt, and his disgust at the slight that he felt had been put
upon her. She married again the following year Barrett's elder brother's
Colonel.
Barrett hustled Maitland about till he got almost thin. He snap-shotted
him waiting for his Maud at Charing Cross station. And he did not make
her write half as often as you would think. But he somehow egged
Maitland on until, by the middle of the vacation, he had worked him up
into such a state that Barrett had to send Maud into a rest cure for her
health, so as to get a little rest himself.
When we met at Cambridge in October he had collected such a lot of
material, such priceless letters, and several good photographs of
Maitland's back, that he said he thought we were almost in a position
to discover to him exactly how he stood.
He threw down his last letter, and as Parker and I read them, any
lurking pity we felt for him as having fallen into Barrett's clutches,
evaporated.
They showed Maitland at his worst. It was obvious that he was tepidly in
love with Maud, or rather that he was anxious she should be in love with
him. He said voluntarily all the things that torture ought not to have
been able to wring out of him. He told her the story of the woman who
had quarrelled with him because he did not dance attendance on her, and
several other incidents which meant, if they meant anything, that there
was something in his personality, hidden from his own searching
self-examination, which was deadly to the peace of mind of the opposite
sex. He was very humble about it. He did not understand it, but there it
was. He said that he had from boyhood lived an austere, intellectual
life, which he humbly hoped had not been without effect on the tone of
the college, that he had never met so far any one whom he could love.
"That's colossal," said Parker, suddenly, striking the letter. "Never
met any one he could love. He'll never better that."
But Maitland went one better. He said he still hoped that some day,
etc., etc., that he now saw with great self-condemnation that if his
life had been altruistic in some ways, it had been egotistic in others,
as in preferring his own independence to the mutual services of
affection; that he must confess to his shame that he had received more
than his share of love, and that he had not given out enough.
"He's determined she shall know how irresistible he is," said Barrett.
"I had no idea these early Victorian methods of self-advertisement were
still in vogue even among the most elderly Dons."
"Hang it all!" blurted out Parker, reddening. "The matter has gone
beyond a joke. We haven't any right to see his mind without its clothes
on. You always say the nude is beautiful. But really--Maitland
undraped--viewed through a key-hole, sets my teeth on edge."
"Undraped? you prude," said Barrett. "What are you talking about?
Maitland is clothed up to his eyes in his own illusions. He's padded out
all round with them back and front to such an extent that you can't see
the least vestige of the human form divine. Personally, I don't think he
has one. I don't believe he is a man at all, but just a globular mass of
conceit and unpublished matter, swathed in a college gown. The thing
that revolts me is the way he postures before her. Malvolio and his
garters isn't in it with Maitland. Good Lord! Supposing she were a real
live woman! What a mercy for him that it's only us, that it's all
strictly _en famille_. I always have said that it's better to keep women
out of love affairs."
"How did you answer this?" said Parker, pushing the last letter from him
in disgust.
"I let him see at last--a little."
"That it was all a joke?"
"No. That I--that Maud, I mean--cared. She did not say much. She never
does. She mostly sticks to flowers and sunsets, but she gave a little
hint of it, and threw in at the same time that she was very much out of
health and going abroad."
"That'll put him off. He'll back out. He would hate to have a delicate
wife. He might have to look after her, instead of her waiting hand and
foot on him."
"We shall see," said Barrett. "Her last letter was posted at Dover."
"Well, mind! It's got to be the last," said Parker decisively. "I had
not realised you had been playing the devil to such an extent as this. I
had a sort of idea that you were only one of a committee. And what a
frightful lot of trouble you must have taken. I suppose Maud was always
moving about so that he could never nail her."
"Always, just where I was going, too, by a curious coincidence. And her
old aunt is a regular tartar; I don't suppose there ever was such a
typical female guardian outside a penny novelette. But she is turning
out a trump now about taking Maud abroad, I will say that for her. They
remain at Dover a week. I've arranged for it. I knew you two would wish
me to feel myself quite untrammelled, and, indeed, I wish it myself.
Then we'll hand him the whole series, and see how he takes it; and tell
him we've shown it to a few of his most intimate friends first, and your
aunt, Parker--she'll nearly die of it--and that they are all of opinion
that it's the best thing he has done since his paper on Bacchylides."
Neither of us answered. In spite of myself I was sorry for Maitland.
A few days later Barrett came to my rooms. We knocked on the floor for
Parker, and he came up.
Then he put down a letter on the table and we read it in silence.
It was just what we expected, an enigmatic, self-protecting effusion.
Maitland was hedging. He had evidently been put off by Maud's illness,
and talked a great deal about friendship being the crown of life, and
how she must think of nothing but the care of her health, etc., etc.;
and he on his side must not be selfish and trouble her with too many
letters, etc.
"Brute," said Parker.
"There's another," said Barrett.
"You don't mean to say you wrote again. There's not been time."
"No. _He_ wrote again. He doesn't seem to have been perfectly satisfied
with the chivalry of the letter you've just read. He's always great on
chivalry, you know. And it certainly would be hard to make that last
letter dovetail in with his previous utterances on a man's instinct to
guard and protect the opposite sex."
Barrett threw down a bulky letter and--may God forgive us--Parker and I
read it together under the lamp.
"I can't go on," said Parker after a few minutes.
"You must," said Barrett savagely.
We read it through from the first word to the last, and as we read
Parker's face became as grave as Barrett's.
It is an awful thing when a poseur ceases to pose, when an egoist
becomes a human being. But this is what had befallen Maitland. The thing
had happened which one would have thought could not possibly happen. He
had fallen in love.
I can't put in the whole of his letter here. Indeed, I don't remember it
very clearly. But I shall not forget the gist of it while I live.
After he had despatched his other letter he told her the scales of
egotism had suddenly dropped from his eyes, and he had realised that he
loved for the first time, and that he could not face life without her,
and that the thought that he might lose her, had possibly already lost
her by his own fault, was unendurable to him. For in the new light in
which now all was bathed he realised the meanness of his previous
letter, of his whole intercourse with her: that he had never for a
moment been truthful with her: that he had attitudinised before her in
order to impress her: that he had always taken the ground that he was
difficult to please, and that many women had paid court to him, but that
it was all chimerical. No woman had ever cared for him except his
mother, and a little nursery governess when he was a lad. During the
last twenty years he had made faint, half-hearted attempts to ingratiate
himself with attractive women: and when the attempts failed, as they
always had failed, he had had the meanness to revenge himself by
implying that his withdrawal had been caused by their wish to give him
more than the friendship he craved. He had said over and over again that
he valued his independence too much to marry, but it was not true. He
did not value it a bit. He had been pining to get married for years and
years. He saw now that to say that kind of thing was only to say in
other words that he had never lived. He had not. He had only talked
about living. He abased himself before her with a kind of passion. He
told her that he did not see how any woman, and she least of all, could
bring herself to care for a man of his age and appearance, even if he
had been simple and humble and sincere, much less one who had taken
trouble to show himself so ignoble, so petty, so self-engrossed, so
arrogant. But the fact remained that he loved her; she had unconsciously
taught him to abhor himself, and he only loved her the more, he
worshipped her, well or ill, kind or unkind, whether she could return it
or not.
We stared at each other in a ghastly silence. I expected some ribald
remark from Barrett, but he made none.
"What's to be done?" said Parker at last.
"There's one thing that can't be done," said Barrett, and I was
astonished to see him so changed, "and that is to show the thing up.
It's not to be thought of."
We both nodded.
"I said it would make a man of him, but I never in my wildest moments
thought it really would," continued Barrett. "It's my fault. You two
fellows said I should go too far."
We assured him that we were all three equally guilty.
"The point is, what's to be done?" repeated Parker.
"I've thought it over," said Barrett, putting the letter carefully in
his pocket, "and I've come to the conclusion it _must_ go on. I have not
the heart to undeceive him. And I don't suppose you two will want to be
more down on him than I am."
"If it goes on he'll find out," I groaned.
"He mustn't be allowed to find out," said Barrett. "He simply mustn't.
I've got to insure that. I dragged the poor devil in, and I've got to
get him out."
"How will you do it?"
"Kill her. There's nothing for it but that. Fortunately she was ill in
the vacation. He's uneasy about her health now. I put her in a rest
cure, if you remember, when he became too pertinacious, and I was
yachting."
"He'll feel her death," said Parker. "It's hard luck on him."
"Suggest something better then," snapped Barrett.
But though we thought over the matter until late into the night we could
think of nothing better. Barrett, who seemed to have mislaid all his
impudent self-confidence, departed at last saying he would see to it.
"Who would have thought it," said Parker to me as I followed him to lock
him out. "And so Maitland is a live man, after all." We stood and looked
across the court to Maitland's windows, who was still burning the
midnight oil.
"You don't think he'll ever get wind of this," I said.
"You may trust Barrett," Parker replied. "Good-night."
Barrett proved trustworthy. He and Parker laid their heads together, and
it was finally decided that Maud's aunt should write Maitland a letter
from Paris describing her sudden death, and how she had enjoined on her
aunt to break it to Maitland, and to send him the little ring she always
wore. After much cogitation they decided that Maud should send him a
death-bed message, in which she was to own that she loved him. Barrett
thought it would comfort him immensely if she had loved him at first
sight, so he put it in. And though he was frightfully short of money he
went up to London and got a very nice little ring with a forget-me-not
in turquoises on it, for the same amount he had won off us about
Maitland's moustache. I think he was glad as it was blood money in a way
(if you can call a moustache blood) that it should go back to Maitland.
The old aunt's letter was a masterpiece. At any other time Barrett's
artistic sense would have revelled in it, but he was out of spirits, and
only carried the matter through by a kind of doggedness. The letter was
prim and stilted, but humane, and the writer was obviously a little hurt
by the late discovery that her dear niece had concealed anything from
her. She returned all the letters which she said her niece had
evidently treasured, and said that she was returning heartbroken to her
house in Pimlico the same day, and would, of course, see him if he
wished it, but she supposed that one so busy as Maitland would hardly be
able to spare the time. The letter was obviously written under the
supposition that the address in Pimlico was familiar to him. It was
signed in full. _Yours faithfully, Maud Markham._
Barrett got a friend whom he could rely on to post the packet on his way
through Paris.
I don't know how Maitland took the news. I don't know what he can have
thought of his grisly letters when he saw them again. But I do know that
he knocked up and had to go away.
There is one thing I admire about Barrett. He did not pretend he did not
feel Maitland's illness, though I believe it was only gout. He did not
pretend he was not ashamed of himself. He never would allow that we were
equally guilty. And when Maitland came back rather thinner and graver,
we all noticed that he treated him with respect. And he never jeered at
him again. Maitland regained his old self-complacency in time and was
dreadfully mysterious and Maitlandish about the whole affair. I have
seen Barrett wince when he made vague allusions to the responsibility of
being the object of a great passion, and the discipline of suffering.
But he _had_ suffered in a way. He really had. And when the Bursar's
wife died Maitland was genuinely kind. He shot off lots of platitudes of
course; but on previous occasions when he had said he had been stirred
to the depths he only meant to the depth of a comfortable arm-chair. Now
it was platitudes and actions mixed. He actually heaved himself out of
his armchair, and exerted himself on behalf of the poor, dreary little
bounder, took him walks, and sat with him in an evening--his sacred
evenings. To think of Maitland putting himself out for anyone! It seemed
a miracle.
After a time it was obvious that the incident had added a new dignity
and happiness to his life. He settled down so to speak, into being an
old bachelor, and grew a beard, and did not worry about women any more.
He felt he had had his romance.
I don't know how it was, but we all three felt a kind of lurking respect
for him after what had happened. You would have thought that what we
knew must have killed such a feeling, especially as it wasn't there
before. But it didn't. On the contrary. And Maitland felt the change,
and simply froze on to us three. He liked us all, but Barrett best.
The Dark Cottage
The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed
Lets in new light through chinks that time has made.
_Edmund Waller._
PART I
1915
John Damer was troubled for his country and his wife and his child.
At first he had been all patriotism and good cheer. "It will be a short
war and a bloody one. The Russians will be in Berlin by Christmas. We
shall sweep the German flag from the seas. We are bound to win."
He had stood up in his place in the House and had said something of that
kind, and had been cheered.
But that was a year ago.
Now the iron had entered into England's soul, and into his soul. He had
long since volunteered, and he was going to France to-morrow after an
arduous training. He had come home to say good-bye.
He might never come back. He might never see his Catherine, his
beautiful young wife, again, or his son Michael, that minute, bald,
amazing new comer with the waving clenched fists, and the pink soles as
soft as Catherine's cheek.
And as John Damer, that extremely able successful wealthy man of thirty,
sat on the wooden bench in the clearing he suddenly realised that, for
the first time in his life, he was profoundly unhappy.
How often he had come up here by the steep path through the wood, as a
child, as a lad, as a man, and had cast himself down on the heather, and
had looked out across that wonderful panorama of upland and lowland,
with its scattered villages and old churches, and the wide band of the
river taking its slow curving course among the level pastures and broad
water meadows.
That river had given him the power to instal electric light in his home,
the dignified Elizabethan house, standing in its level gardens, below
the hill. He could look down on its twisted chimneys and ivied walls as
he sat. How determined his father had been against such an innovation as
electric light, but he had put it in after the old man's death. There
was enough water power to have lit forty houses as large as his.
Far away in the haze lay the city where his factories were. Their great
chimneys were visible even at this distance belching forth smoke,
which, etherealised by distance, hung like a blue cloud over the city.
He liked to look at it. That low lying cloud reminded him of his great
prosperity. And all the coal he used for the furnaces came from his own
coal fields.
But who would take care of all the business he had built up if he fell
in this accursed war? Who would comfort Catherine, and who would bring
up his son when he grew beyond his mother's control?
Yet this was England, spread out before his eyes, England in peril
calling to him her son who dumbly loved her, to come to her aid.
His eyes filled with tears, and he did not see his wife till she was
close beside him, standing in a thin white gown, holding her hat by a
long black ribbon, the sunshine on her amber hair.
She was pale, and her very beauty seemed veiled by grief.
She sat down by him, and smiled valiantly at him. Presently she said
gently:
"Perhaps in years to come, John, you and I shall sit together on this
bench as old people, and Michael will be very kind, but rather critical
of us, as quite behind the times."
And then had come the parting, the crossing, the first sound as of
distant thunder; and then interminable days of monotony; and mud, and
lack of sleep, and noise unceasing; and a certain gun which blew out the
candle in his dug-out every time it fired--and _then_! a rending of the
whole world, and himself standing in the midst of entire chaos and
overthrow, with blood running down his face.
"I'm done for," he said, as he fell forward into an abyss of darkness
and silence, beyond the roar of the guns.
PART II
1965
It was fifty years later.
Michael's wife, Serena, was waiting for her husband. The gallery in
which she sat was full of memorials of the past. The walls were covered
with portraits of Damers. Michael's grandfather in a blue frock coat and
light grey trousers. Michael's father, John Damer, ruddy and determined
in tweeds, with a favourite dog. Michael himself, not so ruddy, nor so
determined, in white smock and blue stockings. Michael's mother,
beautiful and austere in her robe of office.
Presently an aeroplane droned overhead, which she knew meant the
departure of the great Indian doctor, and a moment later Michael came
slowly down the landing steps in the garden, and entered the gallery.
"The operation has been entirely successful," he said.
They looked gravely at each other.
"It seems incredible," she said.
"He said it was a simple case, that all through those years while Father
was unconscious the skull had been slowly drawing together and mending
itself, that he only released a slight lesion in the brain. He has gone
back to Lucknow for an urgent case, but he says he will look in again in
a couple of days time if I let him know there is an adverse symptom. He
said he felt sure all would go well, but that we must guard him from
sudden shocks, and break to him very gradually that it is fifty years
since he was hit at Ypres."
"He'll wake up in his own room where he has lain so long," said Serena.
"Has the nurse changed yet?"
"Yes. We made up the uniform from the old illustrated papers. Blue gown,
white cap and a red cross on the arm."
"We had better get into our things, too," said Michael nervously.
"The blue serge suit is on your bed, and a collar and a tie. I found
them in the oak chest. They must have been forgotten."
"And you?"
"I will wear your Mother's gown which she wore at your christening. She
kept it all her life."
A few minutes later Michael, uneasy in a serge suit which was too tight
for him, and his wife in a short grey gown entered the sick room and sat
down one on each side of the bed. The nurse, excited and self-conscious
in her unfamiliar attire, withdrew to the window.
The old, old man on the bed stirred uneasily, and his white beard
quivered. His wide eyes looked vacantly at his son, as they had looked
at him all Michael's life. Serena, with a hand that trembled a little,
poured a few drops into a spoon, and put them into the half-open lips.
Then they held their breath and watched.
John Damer frowned. A bewildered look came into his vacant eyes, and he
closed them. And he, who had spoken no word for fifty years, said in a
thin quavering voice:
"The guns have ceased."
He opened his eyes suddenly. They wandered to the light, and fell upon
the nurse near the window.
"I am in hospital," he said.
"No. You are in your own home," said Michael, laying his hand on the
ancient wrinkled hand.
The dim sunken eyes turned slowly in the direction of the voice.
"Father," said the old man looking full at Michael. "Father! well, you
do look blooming."
The colour rushed to Michael's face. He had expected complications, and
had prepared numberless phrases in his mind to meet imaginary dilemmas.
But he had never thought of this.
"Not Father," said Serena intervening. "You are forgetting. Father died
before you married, and you put up that beautiful monument to him in the
Church."
"So I did," said the old man, testily. "So I did, but he is exactly like
him all the same, only Father never wore his clothes too tight for him
and a made up tie--never."
Michael, the best dressed man of his day, was bereft of speech.
"You're a little confused still," said Serena. "You were wounded in the
head at Ypres. You have been ill a long time."
There was a silence.
"I remember," said John Damer at last. "Have they taken the Ridge?"
"Yes, long ago."
"Long ago? Oh! can it be--is it possible? Have we?"--the old man reared
himself suddenly in bed, and raised two thin gnarled arms. "Have we--won
the war?"
"Yes," said Michael, as Serena put her arms round his father, and laid
him back on his pillow. "We have won the war."
John Damer lay back panting, trembling from head to foot.
"Thank God," he said, and in his sunken lashless eyes two tears
gathered, and ran down the grey furrows of his cheeks, and lost
themselves in his long white beard.
They gave him the sedative which the doctor had left ready for him, and
when he had sunk back into unconsciousness, they stole out of the room.
They went back to the picture gallery looking on the gardens, and
Michael gazed long at the portrait of his grandfather in the blue frock
coat.
"Am I so like him?" he said with a sort of sob.
"Very like."
He sat down and hid his face in his hands.
"Poor soul," he said. "Poor soul. He's up against it. Do you know I had
almost forgotten we had 'won the war' as he called it. There have been
so many worse conflicts since that act of supreme German folly and
wickedness."
"Not what he would call wars," said Serena. "He only means battles with
soldiers in uniforms, and trenches and guns."
"How on earth are we to break to him that his wife is dead, and that I
am his son, and that he is eighty years of age, and that Jack is his
grandson."
"It must come to him gradually."
"In the meanwhile I shall take off these vile clothes and get back into
my own. Serena, what can a made-up tie be, and why is it wrong?"
Michael tore off his tie and looked resentfully at it at arm's length.
"It is just like the pictures, it seems correct, and it fastens all
right with a hook and eye."
"It is the first time your taste in dress has been questioned, and
naturally it pricks," said Serena smiling at her husband. "It is lucky
Jack did not hear it."
"I don't know who Jack inherits his slovenliness and his clumsiness
from," said Michael. "Why on earth can't he sit on his smock without
crumpling it. I can. He may be a great intellect, I think he is; he
takes after my mother, there is no doubt, but he can't fold his cloak on
his shoulder, he can't help a woman into her aeroplane, and he is so
careless that he can't alight in London on a roof without coming down
either on the sky doorway, or the sky-light. He has broken so many
sky-lights and jammed so many roof doors that nowadays he actually goes
to ground and sneaks up in the lift."
Serena was accustomed to these outbursts of irritation. They meant that
her nervous, highly strung Michael was perturbed about something else.
In this case the something else was not far to seek. He recurred to it
at once.
"Will Father ever understand about Jack and Catherine? Will he ever in
his extreme old age understand about anything?"
"His mind is still thirty," said Serena. "The Iceland brain specialist
said that as well as Ali Khan, and all the other doctors. That is where
they say the danger lies, and where the tragedy lies."
"But how are we to meet it," said Michael walking up and down. Presently
he stopped in front of his wife and said as one who has solved a
problem!
"I think on the whole I had better leave the matter of breaking things
to Father entirely in your hands. It will come better from you than from
me."
And the pictures of the various wives of the various ancestors heard
once more the familiar phrase, to which their wifely ears had been so
well accustomed in their day from the lips of their lords, when anything
uncomfortable had to be done.
* * * * *
So Michael left it to Serena, and in the weeks which followed she guided
her father-in-law, with the endless tenderness of a mother teaching a
child to walk, round some very sharp corners, which nearly cost him his
life, which, so deeply was her heart wrung for him, she almost hoped
would cost him his life.
With a courage that never failed him, and which awed her, he learned
slowly that he was eighty years of age, that his wife had died ten years
ago, at sixty, that Michael was his son, and that he had a very clever
grandson called John after him, one of the ablest delegates of the
National Congress, and a grand-daughter called Catherine. She tried to
tell him how they had lost a few months earlier their eldest son,
Jasper, one of the pioneers of a new movement which was costing as many
lives as flight had cost England fifty years earlier.
"He failed to materialise at the appointed spot," said Serena, "I
sometimes wonder whether his Indian instructor kept back something
essential. The Indians have known for generations how to disintegrate
and materialise again in another place, but it does not come easy to our
Western blood. Jasper went away, but he never came back."
John Damer looked incredulously at Serena, and she saw that he had not
understood. She never spoke of it again.
* * * * *
As the days passed John, fearful always of some new pang, nevertheless
asked many questions of Serena when he was alone with her.
"Tell me about my wife. She was just twenty when I left her."
"She grieved for you with her whole heart."
"Did she--marry again? I would rather know if she did. She would have
been right to do so in order to have someone to help her to bring up
Michael."
"She never married again. How could she when you were alive, and in the
house."
"I forgot."
"She hoped to the last you would be completely restored. All the
greatest doctors in the world were called in, and they assured her it
was only a question of time. Wonderful discoveries had been made in the
Great War as to wounds in the head. But they only gradually learnt to
apply them. And the years passed and passed."
"It would have been kinder to let me die."
"Did doctors let people die when you were young?"
John shook his head.
"They are the same now," she said.
"And I suppose Catherine spent her life here, caring for her child, and
me, and the poor. She loved the poor."
"She cared for you and Michael, and she worked ceaselessly for the cause
of the oppressed. She battled for it. She went into Parliament as it was
called in those days, as soon as the age for women members was lowered
from thirty to twenty-one. She strove for the restriction of the White
Slave Traffic, and for safeguarding children from the great disease.
Some terrible evils were abated by her determined advocacy. But she
always said she did not meet the same opposition the first women doctors
did a hundred years ago, or as Florence Nightingale had to conquer when
she set out to improve the condition of the soldier in hospital and in
barracks, and to reduce the barbarities of the workhouses."
"I should have thought she would have been better employed in her own
home, that she would have been wiser to leave these difficult subjects,
especially the White Slave Traffic--to men."
"They had been left to men for a long time," said Serena.
* * * * *
The day came when he was wheeled out into the garden in the old mahogany
wheel chair which his father had used in the last years of his life.
Serena was sitting beside him. When was she not beside him! Michael, at
a little distance, was talking to two of the gardeners.
"Why do Michael and the gardeners wear smock frocks and blue stockings?"
"It is so comfortable for one thing, and for another it is the old
national peasant dress. We naturally all wish to be dressed alike
nowadays, at any rate when we are in the country, just as the Scotch
have always done."
"I remember," said John, "when I was a small child a splendid old man
of ninety, Richard Hallmark, who used to come to church in a smock frock
and blue worsted stockings and a tall black hat. His grown-up grandsons
in bowler hats and ill-made coats and trousers looked contemptible
beside him, but I believe they were ashamed of him."
His dim eyes scanned the familiar lawns and terraces of the gardens that
had once been his, and the wide pasture lands beyond.
It was all as it had been in his day. Nevertheless he seemed to miss
something.
"The rooks," he said at last. "I don't hear them. What has become of the
rookery in the elms?"
"They've gone," she said. "Ten years ago. Michael felt it dreadfully.
Even now he can hardly speak of it. I hope, Father, you will never
reproach him about it."
"Did he shoot them?" asked the old man in a hollow voice.
"No, no. He loved them, just as you did, but when he installed the Power
Station he put it behind the elm wood to screen it from the house, and
he did not remember, no one remembered, the rookery. You see rooks build
higher than any other birds, and that was not taken into account in the
radiation. At first everything seemed all right. The old birds did not
appear to notice it. Even the smallest birds could pass through the
current it was so slight. But when the spring came it proved too much
for the fledgelings. They died as they were hatched out in the nest.
Then the old birds made the most fearful outcry, and left the place."
"There has always been a rookery at Marcham," said John, his voice
shaking with anger. "I suppose I shall hear of Michael shooting the
foxes next."
Serena did not answer. She looked blankly at him.
* * * * *
Presently John asked that his chair might be wheeled up the steep path
through the wood to the little clearing at the top. Michael eagerly
offered to draw the chair himself, but John refused. He had been distant
towards his son since he had heard about the rookery.
Serena, with the help of a gardener, conveyed him gently to the heathery
knoll, just breaking into purple.
John looked out once more with deep emotion at the familiar spot in the
golden stillness of the September afternoon.
"I sat here with my wife the last afternoon before I went to the front,"
he said in his reedy old man's voice. "The heather was out as it is
now."
His eyes turned to the peaceful landscape, the wooded uplands, the
river, the clustered villages, and far away the city and the tall
chimneys of his factories. As he looked he gave a gasp, and his jaw
fell.
"The factories aren't working," he said.
"Yes, dear, indeed they are."
"They're _not_. Not a sign of smoke. It used to hang like a curtain over
the city."
"Or like a shroud," said Serena looking fixedly at him. "It hung over
the grimy overworked mothers, and the poor grimy fledglings of children
in the little huddled houses. The factories consume their own smoke
now."
"There was a law to that effect in my time," said John, "but nobody
obeyed it."
"No one," she agreed. "No one."
As he looked it seemed as if a cloud of dust rose from the factories,
and eddied in the air. As it drew near it resembled a swarm of bees.
"What on earth is that?" he asked.
"It is the work people going home to the garden city behind the hill. It
would not do for them to live near the factories, would it? The ground
is marshy. There are five or six streams there. And the gas from the
factories has killed all the trees. What was not good for trees could
not be good for children."
"They all lived there in my time. It was handy for work. There was
always a great demand for houses. I know I had to build more."
Serena's eyes fell.
The flight of aeroplanes passed almost overhead followed by two enormous
airships waddling along like monstrous sausages.
"Are those Zeppelins?"
"They are aero busses built on the German models. They superseded the
ground electrics a few years ago. Those two are to carry back the
workers who are more or less deficient, and can't be trusted to fly an
aeroplane; the kind of people who used to be shut up in asylums.
They can do sufficient work under supervision to pay for their own
maintenance. We group with them the hysterical and the melancholy, and
people who can't take the initiative, and those who suffer from inertia
and tend to become blood suckers and to live on the energies of others.
Their numbers grow fewer every year."
* * * * *
Serena and Michael talked long about his father that night.
"But surely he must have seen it was a crime to house his factory hands
like that."
"He didn't seem to. You see he compared well with many employers. He
doesn't know--how could he, that his generation let us in. We paid their
bill. All the wickedness and the suffering of the great black winter had
their root in the blindness and self-seeking of his generation and the
one before him."
"He's never been the same to me since he found I killed the rookery.
What's a rookery to a thousand children reared in a smoky swamp. What
will he think of me when he hears that I stalked and shot the last fox
in the county?"
"He must not hear it. We must guard him," said Serena, "and I pray that
his life may not be long. It can't be, I think, and we have been warned
that any sudden shock will kill him. I wish he could have a joyful shock
and die of it, but there aren't any joyful shocks left for him in this
world I am afraid."
"Have you explained to him that his grandchildren are coming home
to-morrow from the Rocky Mountains?"
"I have told him that they are coming, but not that they have been in
the Rockies. He might think it rather far to go for a fortnight's
fishing."
"Serena, what on earth will Father make of Jack. Jack is so dreadfully
well-informed. I hardly dare open my mouth in his presence. Jack says he
is looking forward to meeting his grandfather, and realising what he
calls his feudal point of view."
"Jack only means by that expounding to his grandfather his own point of
view. I don't think your Father will take to him, but he will love
Catherine; she is so like your Mother, and _she_ never wants to realise
any point of view."
* * * * *
Jack arrived first with his servant and a large hamper of fish. The air
lorry followed with the tents and the fishing tackle and the mastiffs.
"But where is Catherine," asked Michael, as Jack came in pulling off his
leather helmet and goggles.
Jack grinned and said with a spice of malice:
"Catherine fell into the sea."
"She didn't!" said Serena. "That's the second time. How tiresome. She
always has a cold on her chest if she gets wet."
"Where did you leave her?" asked Michael.
"In mid-Atlantic. We kept to the highway. It was her own fault. I warned
her not to loop the loop with that old barge of hers, but she would try
and do it. She was fastened in all right. I saw to that, but her stuff
was loose, and you should have seen all her fish and kettles and the
electric cooker shooting out one after another into the deep. It was in
trying to grab something that she lost control, and fell, barge and all
after her crockery into the sea. I circled round--that is why I am a
quarter-of-an-hour late--till I sighted one of the patrol toddling up,
old Granny Queen Elizabeth it was. Catherine wirelessed to me that she
was all right, and would start again as soon as she was dry and had had
a cigarette, so I came on."
Catherine arrived an hour later, full of apologies about the lost
crockery, and the electric cooker, and was at once put into a hot bath
by her mother and sent to bed.
* * * * *
After the arrival of his grandchildren John spent more and more of his
time in the clearing in the wood. He shrank instinctively from the
sense of movement and life in the house, and his sole prop, Serena,
seemed unable to be so constantly with him as before.
He was never tired of gazing at the gracious lines of the landscape.
Perhaps he loved that particular place because he had sat there with his
wife on their last afternoon together, perhaps also because, in a world
where all seemed changed, that alone, save for the cloud on the horizon,
was unchanged. He was at home there.
Jack took a deep and inquisitive interest in his grandfather which made
him often stroll up the hill to smoke a pipe on the bench near him.
Sometimes John pretended to be asleep when he heard his grandson's
whistle on the path below him. He was bewildered by this handsome,
quick-witted, cocksure, bearded young man who it seemed was already at
twenty-three a promising Fatigue Eliminator, and might presently become
a Simplyfier. His grand-daughter, Catherine, he had not yet seen, as she
was in quarantine owing to a cold, and the Catarrh Inspector had only
to-day pronounced her free from infection.
"You sleep a great deal, Grandfather," said Jack, coming so suddenly
into view that John had not time to close his eyes. "Don't you find so
much sleep tends to retard cerebral activity?"
"I don't happen to possess cerebral, or any other form of activity,"
said John, coldly.
"Do you mean you wish er--to resume the reins? Father and I were talking
of it last night. Everything he has is yours, you know, by law."
John shook his head, and looked at his powerless hands.
"Reins are not for me," he said.
"Well, in my opinion, grandfather," said Jack, with approval, not wholly
devoid of patronage, "you're right. A great deal of water has passed
under the bridge since your day."
"This clearing in the wood is the same," John said. "That is why I like
it, and my old home looks just the same--from here."
There was a moment's silence while Jack lit his pipe.
John suddenly said, "I put in the electric light. My father never would
hear of it, but I did it."
He thought it was just as well that his magnificent grandson should know
that he had done something when he held the reins.
"That is one of the many things I have been wishing to discuss with you,
grandfather. You installed electric light in the house and stables and
garage, but there was power enough to light a town. While you were doing
it, why didn't you light the church and the village as well?"
"I never thought of it."
"But it must have made you very uncomfortable to feel you had not shared
the benefit of it with the community. The village lies at your very
gates. You must have hated the feeling that you had lit yourself up, and
left them in the dark. It was essential, absolutely essential for your
workers' well-being that they should have light. Even in your day the
more intelligent among the agricultural labourers were beginning to
migrate to the towns. We only got them back by better conditions in
lighting and housing, and facilities for movement and amusement."
"Electric light in cottages was unheard of in my time," said John. "It
never entered my head."
"Just so," said Jack. "That seems so odd, so incomprehensible to us
unless we can seize the feudal point of view. You confirm the classics
on the subject. I have questioned numbers of very old men who were in
their prime before the war like you, grandfather, but I have not found
their opinions as definite as yours, because they have insensibly got
all their edges worn off so to speak by lifelong contact with the two
younger generations. Your unique experience is most interesting. Never
entered your head. There you have the feudal system in a nutshell. No
sense of communal life at all. I'll make a note of it--I'm compiling a
treatise on the subject. You were against female suffrage, too, I
remember. I've been reading up your record. You voted several times
against it."
"I did. I consider woman's sphere is in the home."
"Just so. That was the point of view, and there is a lot to say for it
considering the hash women made of power when first they got it, though
not so enormous a hash as the Labour Party. You know, I suppose, we've
had three Labour Governments since the great war?"
"I always prophesied a Labour Government would come, and I feared it. I
knew they had not sufficient education to rule. No conception of foreign
policy."
"Not an atom. I agree with you. Not a scrap. Thirty years ago most of
our rulers hadn't an idea where India was, or why we must complete the
trans-African railway in case we lost control of the Suez Canal. They
actually opposed it. They nearly piloted the Ship of State on to the
rocks."
John frowned.
"Now what I want to know is," said Jack, extending two long blue
stockinged legs, and enjoying himself immensely, "why instead of
opposing female suffrage you did not combine to place the franchise on
an educational basis, irrespective of sex; the grant of the vote to be
dependant on passing certain examinations, mainly in history and
geography. Or, if you were resolved to delay as much as possible the
entrance of women into politics, why didn't you give better national
education. You did neither. You let loose a horde of entirely ignorant
and irresponsible men and women out of your national schools. You say
you foresaw that a Labour Government was inevitable, but you don't seem
to have made any preparation, or taken any precaution to insure its
efficiency when it did come."
John was silent.
"They were also hostile men and women," continued the young man. "That
was the worst of it. Were you at Lille when you were fighting in
France?"
"No."
"Well, the East Lancashires were. They were all miners, and the thing
that interested them most was the devastated mines, ruined by the
Germans in their retreat. And they saw the remains of the bath houses at
the pit heads. Those baths had been there before the war. Every miner
could go back clean to his own home, instead of having to wash in his
own kitchen. Grandfather, you owned coal-mines. Why didn't you and the
other coal-owners put up baths at the pit heads? You would have liked it
if _you_ had been a miner. And just think what it would have saved your
wife. The English miners got them by threats after they had seen the
wrecks of them in France. But why didn't the English coal-owners copy
French methods, if they hadn't the imagination to think them out for
themselves? Why did they only concede when they could not help it?
Reforms were wrung out of the governing class in your day by threats and
strikes. That is what, for nearly thirty years, ruined our class with
Labour when it came into power. Why didn't your generation foresee
that?"
"We didn't see the danger," said John, "as you see it. Everyone can be
wise after the event."
"Just so. But if you couldn't foresee the danger, why didn't you see at
the time the _justice_ of their claims, men like you, grandfather, who
fought for justice for the smaller nations? It seems to me, the national
characteristic of the upper classes fifty years ago must have been
opposition to all change, a tendency to ignore symptoms which really
were danger signals, and an undeveloped sense of justice ..., which only
acted in certain grooves. The result was the uneducated came into power,
embittered, without a shred of confidence in the disinterestedness of
the educated. The Commonwealth--"
"The what?"
"The Commonwealth--you used to call it the Empire--nearly went upon the
rocks."
Jack's young face became awed and stern and aged, as John had seen
men's faces become when they charged through the mud in the dawn.
"I was in Liverpool," Jack said, "all through the Black Winter. It
needn't have been. It never, never need have been if there had been
justice and sympathy in England for Labour forty years before. But there
was not. So they paid us back in our own coin. We had no justice from
them. My God! I can't blame them."
Serena, coming quietly up the path, saw the two men looking fixedly at
each other, both pallid in the soft sunshine. The same shadow of
suffering seemed to have fallen on the beautiful young face, and on the
old one.
"You must not talk any more," she said to John, casting a reproachful
glance at her son. "You are over-tired."
Jack took the hint, kissed his mother's hand, and walked slowly away. He
was deeply moved.
John shivered. A deathlike coldness was creeping over him, was laying an
icy hand upon his heart. He turned to his sole comforter, Serena,
watching him with limpid grieved eyes.
"Your grand-daughter, Catherine, is coming up to see you in a few
minutes," she said, trying as always to guard him against surprise. "How
cold your hands are, Father. I could not let her see you till she had
been disinfected after her chill for fear she might give it to you."
He was not listening.
"Serena," he said feebly. "The world is not my world any longer. I am a
stranger and a sojourner in it. All my landmarks are swept away. I wish
I could be swept away, too."
Serena took his cold hands in hers, and held them to her breast.
"Father," she said, "unless you and countless others, all the best men
of your time had given your lives for your country, we should have no
country to-day. You bled for us, you kept it for us, for your son, and
your son's son: and we all honour and thank you for what you have done
for us."
John Damer's eyes looked full at her in a great humility.
"I see now," he said, in his thin quavering voice, "that I only died for
my country. I did not live for her. I took things more or less as I
found them. I was blind, blind, blind."
She would fain have lied to him, but her voice failed her.
He looked piercingly at her.
"Did the others--all those who never fought--there were so many who did
not fight--and those who fought and came back--did they live for her,
did they try to make a different England, to make her free and
happy--after the war?"
"Some did," said Serena, "but only a minority."
She saw his eyes fix suddenly. His face became transfigured.
"She's coming up the path," he said, in an awed whisper. "Catherine is
coming."
Serena followed his rapt gaze and saw her daughter coming towards them
in a white gown, her hat hanging by a ribbon in her hand, the sunshine
upon her amber hair.
"Catherine," said the old man, "Catherine, you have come to me at last.
You said we should sit here together when I was old. You've come at
last."
And he, who for fifty years had not walked a step, without help, raised
himself to his full height, and went to meet her with outstretched arms.
They caught him before he fell, and one on each side of him supported
him back to the bench.
He sank down upon it, blue to the lips. Serena laid the trembling white
head upon her daughter's breast. The bewildered young girl put her arms
gently round him in silence.
John Damer sighed once in supreme content, and then--breathed no more.
The Ghost of a Chance
"Yes, but the years run circling fleeter,
Ever they pass me--I watch, I wait--
Ever I dream, and awake to meet her;
She cometh never, or comes too late."
_Sir Alfred Lyall._
"The thing I don't understand about you," I said, "is why you have never
married. Your love affairs seem to consist in ruining other people's. I
was on the verge of getting married myself years ago when you lounged in
and spoilt my chance. But when you had done for me you did not come
forward yourself, you backed out. I believe, if the truth were known,
you have backed out over and over again."
Sinclair did not answer. He frowned and looked sulkily at me with
lustreless eyes. He was out of health, and out of spirits, and ill at
ease.
The large, luxurious room, with its dim oriental carpets and its shaded
lights, and its wonderful array of Indian pictures and its two exquisite
rose-red lacquer cabinets, had a great charm for me who lived in small
lodgings in the city near my work. But it seemed to hold little pleasure
for him. I sometimes doubted whether anything held much pleasure for
him. He had just returned from China. The great packing cases piled one
above another in the hall were no doubt full of marvellous acquisitions,
china, embroideries, rugs. But he did not seem to care to unpack them.
"Did I really spoil your marriage?" he said listlessly. He looked old
and haggard and leaden-coloured, and it was difficult to believe he was
the magnificent personage who had diverted Mildred's eyes from me ten
years before.
"Don't pretend you didn't know it at the time," I retorted.
His behaviour had been outrageous, and I, with my snub nose and
crab-like gait, had been cast aside. I could not blame her. He was like
a prince in a fairy tale. I never blamed her. She knows that now; in
short, she knows everything.
"No, my pepper pot, I won't pretend I didn't know it. But I thought--I
had a strong impression--I was mistaken, of course, but I thought
that--"
"That what?"
His face altered.
"That it was _she_," he said below his breath.
I stared at him uncomprehending.
"She looked like it," he went on more to himself than to me. "She had a
sweet face. I thought it _might_ be she. But it was not."
Silence fell on us.
At last I said:
"Perhaps you will be interested to hear that she and I have made it up."
"I am," he said, and his dull eyes lightened, "if you are sure she is
the right woman; really sure, I mean."
"I've known that for eleven years," I said, "but the difficulty has been
to get the same idea firmly into her head. At any rate, it's in now.
I've tattooed it on every square inch of her mind, so to speak. If I had
been let alone she would have been my downtrodden, ill-used wife, and I
should have been squandering her money for the last ten years. I shall
have to hammer her twice a day and get heavily into debt to make up for
lost time. Why don't you marry yourself, Sinclair? That is what you
want, though you don't know it; what I want, what we all want, someone
to bully, something weaker than ourselves to trample on."
"Don't I know it!" he said. "I know it well enough. But how am I to find
her?"
"Marry Lady Valenes. I'm sure you've made trouble and scandal enough in
that quarter. Now old Valenes is dead you ought to marry her; and she's
more beautiful than ever. I saw her at the opera last night."
Sinclair stared straight in front of him with his long hands on his
knees. His face, thickened and coarsened, fell easily into lines of
fatigue and ill temper.
"What is the use of Lady Valenes to me?" he said savagely. "What is the
use of any woman in the world, except the right one?"
"Well, you acted as if she was the right one when her poor jealous old
husband was alive. It's just like you to think she won't do now he is
dead and she is free."
He was silent again.
I was somewhat mollified by the remembrance that I had got Mildred, the
most elusive and difficult of women, firmly under my thumb at last, and
I said:
"The truth is, you don't know what love is, you haven't got it in you to
care a pin about anyone except yourself, or you would have married years
ago. Who do you think you're in love with now?"
"The same woman," he said wearily, "always the same."
"Then marry her and have done with it, and turn this wretched museum
into a home."
"I can't find her."
"What is her name?"
"I don't know."
"Just seen her once, I suppose," I retorted. "A perfect profile sailing
past in a carriage under a lace parasol. And you think that's love.
Little you know."
I expanded my chest. Since I had come to terms with Mildred, some thirty
hours before--and I had had a very uphill fight of it before she gave
in--I felt that I was an expert in these matters.
"Chipps," said Sinclair. (Chipps is not my name, but it has stuck to me
ever since I was at school.) "Chipps, the truth is, we are in the same
boat."
My old wound gave a sudden twinge.
"No," I said. "No. We aren't. I'm not taking any water exercise with
you, so you needn't think it. Mildred and I are walking on the
towing-path arm in arm, and I don't approve of boating for her because I
don't like it myself. So she remains on dry land with me. In the same
boat, indeed!"
"I meant, we were both in love," he said with the ghost of a smile, "if
your corkscrew advances towards matrimony can be called love. I did not
mean that we were in love with the same woman."
"I don't care if you are _now_. I did care damnably once, but I don't
mind a bit now. Do your worst."
"The conquering hero, and no mistake," Sinclair said, looking at me with
something almost like affection, and he put out his hand. "Good luck to
you, old turkey cock."
I shook his hand harder than I intended, quite warmly, in fact.
"Why don't you marry too?" I said. "It would make all the difference to
you, as it has to me."
We seemed suddenly very near to each other, as we had been in the old
days; nearer than we had ever been since he had made trouble between
Mildred and me.
He looked at me with a kind of forlorn envy.
"I cannot find her," he said again.
The words fell into the silence of the large, dimly lighted room.
And perhaps because we had been at school together, perhaps because I
had no longer a grudge against him, perhaps because I was not quite so
repellent to confidences as heretofore, and he was conscious of some
undefinable change in me, Sinclair said his say.
"I fell in and out of love fairly often when I was young," he said.
"You've seen me do it. But at the back of my mind there was always a
deep-rooted conviction that I was only playing at it, and the real thing
was to come, that there was the one woman waiting somewhere for me. I
wasn't in any hurry for her. I supposed she would turn up at the right
moment. But the years passed. I reached thirty. As I got older I began
to have sudden horrible fits of depression that she wasn't coming after
all. They did not last, but they became more severe as I gradually
realised that I could not really live without her, that I was only
marking time till she came.
"And one summer night, or rather morning, ten years ago, something
happened. You need not believe it unless you like, Chipps. It's all one
to me whether you do or you don't. I came home from a ball, and I found
among my letters one dictated by my young sister saying she was very ill
and wishing to see me. She was always ill, poor little thing, and always
wanting to see me. She was consumptive, and she lived in the summer
months with her nurse in a shooting-box high up on the Yorkshire moors,
the most inaccessible place, but she liked it, and the doctor approved
of it. I used to go and see her there when I had time. But that was not
often. I had made provision for her comfort, but I seldom saw her.
"I laid the letter down, and wondered whether I ought to go. I did not
want to leave London at that moment. I had been dancing all night with
Mildred, and was very much _épris_ with her. Then I saw there was a
postscript in the same handwriting, no doubt that of the nurse. "Miss
Sinclair is more ill than she is aware."
"That settled it. I must go. Once before I had been warned her condition
was serious, and had hurried up to Yorkshire to find her almost as
usual. But, nevertheless, I supposed I ought to go. I felt irritated
with the poor little thing. But as my other sister Anna was married and
out in India, I was the only relation she had left in England. I decided
to go.
"In that case it was not worth while to go to bed. I sat down by the
open window, and watched the dawn come up behind Westminster. And as I
sat with the letter in my hand a disgust of my life took hold of me. It
looked suddenly empty and vain and self-seeking, and cumbered with
worldly squalid interests and joyless amusements. And where was the one
woman of whom I had had obscure hints from time to time? Other women
came and went. But she who was essential to me, who became more
essential to my well-being with every year--she never came. I felt an
intense need of her, a passionate desire to find her, to seek her out.
But where?
"And as I sat there I felt in my inmost soul a faint thrill, a vibration
that gradually flooded my whole being, and then slowly ebbed away. And
something within me, something passionate surrendered myself to it, and
was borne away upon it as by an outgoing tide. It ebbed farther and
farther. And I floated farther and farther away with it in a golden
mist. And in a wonderful place of peace I saw a young girl sitting alone
in the dawn. I could not see her face, but I recognised her. She was the
one woman in the world for me, my mate found at last. And I was consumed
in an agony of longing. And I ran to her, and fell on my knees at her
feet, and hid my face in her gown. And she bent over me, and raised me
in her arms and held my head against her breast. And she said, 'Do not
be distressed, I love you, and all is well.'
"And we spoke together in whispers, and my agitation died away. I did
not see her face, but I did not need to. I knew her as I had never known
anyone before. I had found her at last.
"I had never guessed, I had never dreamed, I had never read in any book
that anything could be so beautiful. It was beyond all words. It was
more wonderful than dawn at sea. I leaned my head against her and cried
for joy. And she soothed me as a mother soothes her child. But she was
crying too, crying for sheer joy. I felt her tears on my face. She
needed me as I needed her. That was the most wonderful of all, her need
of me. We had been drawn to each other from the ends of the earth, and
we were safe in each other's arms at last.
"And then gradually, imperceptibly, a change came. The same tide which
had brought me to her feet began to draw me away again, and sudden
terror seized me that I was going to lose her. I clung convulsively to
her, but my arms were no longer round her. We were apart, stretching out
our hands to each other. Her figure was growing dimmer and dimmer in a
golden mist. In an agony I cried to her. 'Where shall I find you? Tell
me how to reach you?' And she laughed, and her voice came serene and
reassuring. 'We shall meet. You are on your way to me. You will find me
on the high road.'
"And we were parted from each other, and I came slowly back over immense
distances and moving waveless tides of space; back to this room, and the
dawn coming up behind the tower of Westminster."
"You awoke in fact," I said.
"No. I had not been asleep. I returned. And an immense peace enveloped
me. But gradually that too, ebbed away as I began to realise that I had
not seen her face. She was in the world, she was waiting for me. Thank
God that was no delusion. But which of all the thousands of women in the
crowd was she? How was I to know her? 'You are on your way to me, you
will find me on the high road.' That was what she had said, and it
flashed through my mind that she might be Mildred. 'You are on your way
to me.' I was to motor Mildred to Burnham Beeches that very afternoon. I
had arranged to take her there before I had received the letter about my
sister. Chipps, I dare say you will think me heartless, perhaps you
often have, but I simply dared not start off to Yorkshire that morning,
even if my sister was dangerously ill. I had a feeling that my whole
future was at stake, that I must see Mildred again, that nothing must
come between her and me. I went with her to Burnham Beeches. We spent
the afternoon together."
"I have not forgotten that fact," I said.
"And I found I was mistaken," he said. "She knew nothing. The same
evening I went to Yorkshire, but I did not find my sister. She had died
suddenly that afternoon."
"You would have been in time to see her if you had let Mildred alone," I
said brutally.
He did not answer for a long time.
"For ten years I looked for her, now in one person now in another, but I
could not find her. I tried to go to her again in that waking dream, but
I could not find the way. I could not discover any clue to her. For ten
years she made no sign. At last I supposed she was dead, and I gave her
up.
"That was last autumn. Gout had been increasing on me, and I had been up
to Strathpeffer to take the waters there. And my other sister Anna, now
a widow, pressed me to stay a few days with her at the little house on
the moors where my younger sister had lived, and which I allowed Anna to
use as her home as she was extremely poor. The air was bracing and I
needed bracing, so I went, dropping down from Strathpeffer by easy
stages in my motor. I was glad I went. The heat was great, but on those
uplands there was always a fresh air stirring. Anna, who had hardly seen
me for years, made much of me, and though she had no doubt become
rather eccentric since her husband's death, that did not matter much on
a Yorkshire moor. I spent some happy days with her, and it turned out to
be fortunate that I had come, for on the third afternoon of my visit,
she had found out--she found out everything--that an old servant of
mine, the son of my foster mother, had got into difficulties, and was
being sold up next day at a distant farm. She urged me to motor over
very early in the morning and stop the sale and put him on his legs
again. I rather liked the idea of a thirty mile drive across the moors
before the sun was up, and I agreed to go. I had no objection to acting
Providence and pleasing Anna at the same time.
"I shall never forget that afternoon. We had tea together in the
verandah, overlooking the great expanse of the heathered, purple moors.
And the thunder which had hung round us all day rolled nearer and
nearer. The moors looked bruised and dark under the heavy sky. The long
white road grew whiter and whiter. My sister left me to shut all the
windows, and I lay in my long deck chair and looked at the road.
"And as I looked the words came back to my mind. 'You will find me on
the high road.' Lies! Lies! Ten years I had been seeking her. I should
never find her. And far, far away on the empty highway I saw a woman
coming. My heart beat suddenly, but I remembered that I had been
deceived a hundred times, and this was no doubt but one more deception.
I watched her draw nearer and nearer. She came lightly along towards the
house under the livid sky with the heather on each side of her. She had
a little knapsack on her shoulder. And as she drew near the breathless
stillness before the storm was broken by a sheet of lightning and a clap
of thunder. My sister rushed up and dragged the chairs farther back.
Then her eye caught sight of the tall grey figure now close below us on
the road. A few great drops fell.
"Anna ran down to the gate and called to the woman to take shelter. She
walked swiftly towards us, and then ran with my sister up the steps,
just as the storm broke.
"'Magnificent,' she said, easing her shoulder of the strap of her
knapsack while her eyes followed the driving rain cloud. 'How kind of
you to call me in. There is not another house within miles.'
"She was a very beautiful woman of about thirty, with a small head and a
clear-cut grave face. Her dark, parted hair had a little grey in it on
the temples. She smoothed it with slender, capable, tanned hands. She
had tea with us, my sister welcoming her as if she were her dearest
friend. That was Anna all over.
"The thunderstorm passed, but not the rain. It descended in sheets.
"The stranger looked at it now and then, and at last rose and put out
her hand for her knapsack.
"'I must be going,' she said.
"But Anna would not hear of it. There was not another house within
miles. She insisted on her stopping the night. A room was got ready, and
presently we all three sat down to a nondescript meal which poor Anna
believed to be dinner.
"I was attracted by our guest, but not more than I had often been before
by other women. She had great beauty, but I had seen many beautiful
women during the last twenty years. She was gay, and I like gaiety. And
she had the look of alertness and perfect health which often accompanies
a happy temperament. She and Anna talked incessantly, at least, Anna
did. I did not join in much. My cure had left me languid. When we had
finished our meal we found the rain had ceased, and the moon shone high
in heaven over a world of mist. The moors were gone. The billows of mist
drifted slowly past us like noiseless waves upon a great sea. The house
and terraced garden rose above it like a solitary island. The night was
hot and airless, and we sat out on the verandah, and talked of many
things.
"Of course, Anna is eccentric. There is no doubt about it. But the
worst of her is that her form of eccentricity is infectious. She is
extremely impulsive and confidential, and others follow suit if they are
with her. I have known her once (at a luncheon party of eight people
whom she had never met before) say, as a matter of course, that she
remembered a previous existence, and sleeping seven in a bed in an
underground cellar. I was horrified, but no one else was. And a grave
man beside her, a minister, told her that when first he went to Madeira
he remembered living there in a little Portuguese cottage with a row of
sugar canes in front of it. He said he recognised the cottage the moment
he saw it, and said to himself, 'At any rate, I am happier now than I
was then.' A sort of barrier seemed always to go down in Anna's
presence. People momentarily lost their fear of each other, and said
things which I have no doubt they regretted afterwards.
"I need hardly say that as Anna looked at the moonlight and the mist she
became recklessly indiscreet. I could not stop her. I did not try. I
shut my eyes, and pretended to be asleep. And she actually told this
entire stranger all about her first meeting with her late husband, which
it seemed had taken place on an expedition to Nepal. Anna was always
wandering over the globe with Lamas, or sailing on inflated pigskins
with wild Indians, or things of that kind. I had only known the bare
fact of her marriage with a distinguished but impecunious soldier who
had died some years later, and I was amazed what a dramatic story she
made of her first encounter with him on the mountains of Nepal, and how
his coolies had all run away, and she let him join on to her party. And
how they walked together for three days through a land of rose-coloured
rhododendrons; without even knowing each other's name, and how she
cooked their meals at the doors of the little mud rest-houses. There was
something very lovable after all in the way Anna told it. I realised for
the first time that she, too, had lived, that she had been touched by
the sacred flame, and that it was natural to her to speak of her great
happiness, the memory of which dwelt continually with her.
"I saw through my half-closed eyes the strange woman's hand laid for a
moment on Anna's hand.
"'You were very fortunate,' she said gently.
"'Was I?' said Anna. 'I suppose everyone else is the same. We all see
that light once in our lives, don't we? I am sure you have too.'
"'I am unmarried,' said the stranger, 'and thirty years of age, and
nothing of that kind has ever happened to me. I was once engaged to be
married for a short time. But I had to break it off. It was no good. I
suppose,' she said, with a low laugh, 'that the reason we are both
talking so frankly is because we are entire strangers to each other.'
"'I do believe the world would go all right, and that we should all be
happy if only we did not know each other,' said Anna earnestly.
"I felt sure the stranger would think her mad, but she answered
tranquilly:
"'There are two ways of living absolutely happily with our fellow
creatures, I think. When you know nothing about them and have no tie to
them, and when you know them through and through. But on the long road
between where all the half-way houses are, there seems to be a lot of
trouble and misunderstanding and disappointment.'
"'We can never know anyone through and through until we love them,' said
Anna.
"'No,' said the stranger, 'Love alone can teach that. Even I know that,
I who have never seen love except once--in a dream.'
"'Tell me about it,' said Anna.
"'I have never spoken of it,' she said with the same tranquillity; her
face as I took one glance at it serene and happy in the moonlight,
'except to my sister. And it is curious that I should speak of it here;
for it was in this house it happened to me.'
"'You have been here before?' said Anna.
"'Yes. Ten years ago. That was why I went out of my way on my walking
tour to-day just to look at the little place again. I stayed a month
here, and I helped a friend of mine who is now dead, a trained nurse, to
nurse a Miss Sinclair who was dying here.'
"'We are her brother and sister,' said Anna.
"'I thought it possible when I saw you on the verandah. You are both
like her in a way. My friend, who was in charge, was over-taxed, and I
came down to help her. Two nurses were necessary, but she did not like
to complain, and the family seemed rather inaccessible. Miss Sinclair
liked me, and I did the night work till she died. I left directly she
was gone.'
"'My brother was too late,' said Anna.
"'Yes,' she said. 'I was grieved for him. I added a postscript unknown
to her, to her last letter to him which I wrote at her dictation. My
postscript would have alarmed him and brought him at once. But the
letter must have been delayed in the post. The last night before the end
I was sitting here on the verandah. I had just been relieved, and I
ought to have gone to bed, but I came and sat here instead and watched
the dawn come up, 'like thunder,' behind the moors. And as I sat I
became very still, as if I were waiting in a great peace. And gradually
I became conscious as at an immense distance of someone in trouble. I
was not asleep, and I was not fully awake. And from a long, long way off
a man came swiftly to me, and threw himself on his knees at my feet,
and hid his face in my gown. He was greatly agitated, but I was not. And
I wasn't surprised either. I raised him in my arms, and held him to my
breast, and said, "Do not be distressed, for I love you, and all is
well." It was quite true. I did love him absolutely, boundlessly, as I
love him still. And gradually his agitation died away, and he rested in
my arms, and ecstasy such as I had never thought possible enfolded us
both. We both cried for sheer joy, and for having found each other. It
was beyond anything I had ever dreamed. It was as beautiful as the
dawn.'
"'It _was_ the dawn,' said Anna.
"'If it was the dawn, the day it spoke of never came,' said the stranger
quietly, 'and presently we were parted from each other, and he began to
be frightened again. And he called to me, 'Tell me how to find you,' and
I laughed, for I saw he could not miss me. I saw the way open between
him and me. Such a short little way, and so clear. I said, 'You are on
your way to me now. You will find me on the high road.' It was such a
plain road, that even a blind man could not miss it. And we were parted
from each other and I came back to the other dawn, the outer dawn. For
days and weeks I walked like one in a dream. I felt so sure of him, I
would have staked my life upon his coming--that is ten years ago--but he
never came.'
"Chipps, I thought the two women must have heard the mad hammering of my
heart. She was there before me in the moonlight, found at last--my
beautiful, inaccessible mate. And she was free, and we loved each other
as no one had loved since the world began. I could neither speak nor
move. Though it was joy, it was the sharpest pain I had ever known. I
did not know how to bear it.
"'My dear, he will come still,' said Anna.
"'Will he?' said the stranger, and she shook her head. She rose and
stood in the moonlight, a tall, noble figure. And for the first time
there was a shade of sadness on her serene, happy face.
"'I saw the road so clear,' she said, 'but I am afraid he has somehow
missed it. I have an intuition that he will not come now, that he is
lost.'
"Sitting far back in the shadow, I looked long at her, at my wonderful
dream came true; and I swore that I would never lose sight of her again
once found. I would take no risks; I would bind her to me with hooks of
steel.
"And then, in a few minutes, it was bedtime, and Anna aroused me, and
she and her guest went off together hand in hand. I dragged myself to my
room, too. I was shaking from head to foot, and Brown, my valet, said
'You aren't fit, sir, to start at six in the morning.'
"I had clean forgotten that I had arranged to drive early across the
moors to stop the sale of my foster brother's farm. It was impossible to
go now. I might come back in the afternoon and find my lady flown. There
was no telegraph office within miles; I must think of some other plan.
It was too late to countermand the motor, which put up several miles
away. So I told Brown to send it back when it arrived at six, and to
tell the chauffeur to bring it round again at eleven. Then, perhaps, my
lady would deign to drive with me, and I might have speech with her.
"'On the high road'--that was where she had said we should meet. Yes,
when we were on the high road alone together, I would prove to her that
I was her lover. I would boldly claim her. She would never repulse me,
for she needed me as I needed her.
"I did not sleep that night. It seemed so impossible, so amazing, that
we had met at last. I felt transformed, younger than I had ever been.
Waves of joy passed over me, and yet I was frightened, too. There was a
sort of warning voice at the back of my mind telling me that I should
lose her yet. But that was nonsense. My nerves were shaken. I could not
lose her again. I would see to that.
"Very early, long before six, I heard Anna stirring. I remembered with
compunction that she had only one servant, and that she had said she
would get up and cook my breakfast for me herself before I started. Anna
was an excellent cook. I heard her rattling the kitchen grate and
singing as she laid the breakfast and presently there were two voices,
Anna's and another. I knew it was the voice of my lady. I felt unable to
lie still any longer, and when the motor came round at six I was already
half dressed. There was a momentary turmoil, and an opening and shutting
of doors, and then the motor went away again. I finished dressing and
went into the garden into the soft September sunshine. There was no one
about. I went back to the house and found the servant clearing away a
meal and relaying the table for me. I asked her where her mistress was,
and she said she had gone in the motor with the other lady and had left
a note for me. Sure enough, there was a scrawl stuck up on the
mantelpiece.
"'So sorry you are not well enough to start, but don't worry your
kind heart about it. I have gone in your place and will arrange
everything. Take care of yourself, and don't wait luncheon.'
"I got through the morning as best I could. I was abominably tired after
my sleepless night and getting up so early, and a horrible anxiety grew
and grew in me as the hours passed and Anna did not return. I had
luncheon alone, and still no Anna. Could there have been an accident? I
thought of my careful chauffeur and my new Daimler. Nothing ever
happened to Anna, but I could not tolerate the idea of any risk to my
lady. At last I heard the motor, and Anna came rushing in.
"'It's all right,' she cried joyfully. 'Brian's farm is saved, and he
and his old mother can't thank you enough. I told them both it was all
your doing, and you had sent me as you were not well enough to go
yourself. Brown told me how poorly you were. And it was only a hundred
and fifty pounds, after all. I gave my cheque for it, as I didn't like
to wake you for a blank one. They were almost paralysed with surprise.
They could hardly thank me--I mean you--at first. Old Nancy cried, poor
old darling, and called down blessings on you.'
"'Did your guest enjoy the drive?' I said at last.
"'She did,' said Anna. 'And, oh! how I wished you had been well enough
to be driving with her instead of me. The world was all sky. Such a
pageant I had never seen--such vistas and fastnesses and citadels of
light. She said she should remember it always.'
"'She is not tired, I hope?' I said.
"'Tired! She said she was never tired. She said she would have walked
the whole way if there had been time; but of course she was delayed by
last night's storm. So she was glad of the lift, and I dropped her at
the cross roads above Riffle station. That was a splendid woman,
Gerald.'
"I turned cold.
"'Do you mean to say she's gone?'
"'Yes. She sails for South America on Tuesday. I forget why she said she
was going.'
"'And what was her name?'
"'I haven't an idea.'
"'Anna, you don't mean to say you let her go without finding out her
name and address?'
"'I never thought of such a thing. She never asked any questions about
me, and I didn't ask any about her. Why should I? What does her name
matter?'"
Sinclair groaned.
"I lost her absolutely just when I thought I was sure of her," he said.
"She walked into my life and she walked out of it again, leaving no
trace. I haven't had the ghost of a chance."
"Perhaps you will meet her again," I said at last, somewhat lamely. "She
may turn up suddenly, just when you least expect her."
He shook his head.
"I shall never find her," he said. "She's gone for ever, I know it. She
knew it. Lost! Lost! Lost!"
And the shadowed room echoed the word "Lost!"
I told the whole story to Mildred next day. I dare say I ought not to
have done, but I did.
"Poor Mr. Sinclair," she said softly when I had finished.
"Do you think he's off his head?" I said. "It sounds perfectly
ridiculous, a sort of cracked hallucination."
"Oh, no. It's all true," said Mildred, in the same matter-of-fact tone
as if she had said the fire was out. Women are curious creatures. The
story evidently did not strike her as at all peculiar.
"What a pity he did not stick to the high road," she said.
"What high road, in Heaven's name?" I asked.
"Why, his duty, of course. Don't you see, it was there she was sitting
waiting for him. It led him straight to her. She saw that, and that he
couldn't miss her. He had only got to take the train to his sister when
she was dying and he would have found his lady there. That was what she
meant when she said the road was open between them. But he went down a
side track to flirt with me and lost his chance. And the second time, if
he had only stuck to going to the rescue of his foster brother, he could
have given her a lift in his motor as Anna did, and have made himself
known to her."
"What a preposterously goody-goody idea! I don't believe it for a
moment. Here have I been doing my duty for the last ten years, toiling
and moiling and snarling at everybody, and it never led me to you that I
can see."
"It might have done," said Mildred, "if you hadn't been entirely
compacted of pride and uncharitableness. I made a mistake ten years ago,
and was horribly sorry for it, but you never gave me a chance of setting
it right till last Tuesday."
"I never thought I had the ghost of a chance till last Tuesday," I said.
"Upon my honour I didn't. The first moment I saw it I simply pounced on
it."
"Pounced on it, did you?" said Mildred scornfully "And poor me, with
hardly a rag of self-respect left from laying it in your way over and
over again for you to pounce on. Men are all alike; all as blind as
bats. I'm sure I don't know why we trouble our heads about them with
their silly ghosts and chances and pouncings."
The Goldfish
A Favourite has no Friends.
It was my first professional visit to the Robinsons. I had been called
in to prescribe for Arthur Robinson, a nervous, emaciated young man,
whom I found extended on a black satin sofa, in a purple silk dressing
gown embroidered with life-sized hydrangeas. The sofa and the dressing
gown shrieked aloud his artistic temperament.
He had a bronchial cold, and my visit was, as he said, purely
precautionary. He kept me a long time recounting his symptoms, and
assuring me that he was absolutely fearless, and then dragged himself to
his feet and led me into the magnificent studio his mother had built for
him, where his sketches were arranged on easels, and where we found his
wife, a pale, dark-eyed young creature cleaning his brushes.
He appeared--like most egotistic people--to be greatly in need of a
listener, and he poured forth his views on art, and the form his own
message to the world would probably take. I am unfortunately quite
inartistic, but I gave him my attention. I was in no hurry, for at that
time the one perpetual anxiety that dogged my waking hours was that I
had not enough patients.
At last I remembered that I ought not to appear to have time to spare,
and his wife took me downstairs to the drawing-room, where his mother
was awaiting us, a large, fair woman, with a kindly foolish face.
I saw at once that I was in for another interview as long as the first.
Mrs. Robinson did not wait for me to give an opinion on her son's
condition. She pressed me to be perfectly frank, and, before I could
open my mouth to reply, poured forth a stream of information on what was
evidently her only theme--Arthur's health.
"I said the day before yesterday--didn't I, Blanche. 'Arthur, you have
got a cold.' And _he_ said, so like him--'No Mother, I haven't.' That is
Arthur all over. Isn't it, Blanche?"
Blanche made no response. She sat motionless, gazing at her
mother-in-law with half absent eyes, as if she were trying--and
failing--to give her whole attention to the matter in hand.
"Then I said in my joking way, 'Arthur, I can't have you starting a
cold, and giving it to me and Blanche.' We don't want any presents of
that kind. Do we, Blanche?"
Blanche made no reply. Perhaps experience had taught her that it was a
waste of energy.
"So I said, 'with your tendency to bronchitis I shall send for Doctor
Giles, and it will be a good opportunity to make his acquaintance now
that our dear Doctor Whittington has retired.'"
It went on a long time, Mrs. Robinson beaming indiscriminately on me and
her daughter-in-law.
At last, when she was deeply involved in Arthur's teething, I murmured a
few words and stood up to go.
"You will promise faithfully, won't you, to look in again to-morrow."
I said that a telephone message would summon me at any moment. As I held
out my hand I heard a loud splash.
"Now, Dr. Giles, you are wondering what _that_ is," said Mrs. Robinson
gleefully.
I looked round and saw at the further end of the immense be-mirrored
double drawing-room a grove of begonias, and heard a faint trickle of
water.
"It's an aquarium," said Mrs. Robinson triumphantly, and she looked
archly at me. "Shall we tell Dr. Giles about it, Blanche?"
"It has a goldfish in it," said Blanche, opening her lips for the first
time.
"That was the splash you heard," continued Mrs. Robinson, as if she were
imparting a secret. "That splash was made by the goldfish."
I gave up any thought I may have had of paying other professional calls
that morning, and allowed Mrs. Robinson to lead me to the aquarium.
As aquariums in back drawing-rooms go it was a very superior aquarium,
designed especially for the house, so Mrs. Robinson informed me, by a
very superior young man at Maple's----quite a gentleman.
The aquarium had gravel upon its shallow bottom, and large pointed
shells strewed upon the gravel. The water trickled in through a narrow
grating on one side, and trickled out through another on the other side.
An array of flowering begonias arranged round the irregularly shaped
basin, gave the whole what Maple's young man had pronounced to be "a
natural aspect," and effectually hid the two gratings while affording an
unimpeded view of the shells, and the inmate.
In the shallow water, motionless, save for his opening and shutting
gills, and a faint movement of his tail, was poised a large obese
goldfish.
I looked at him through the gilt wire-netting stretched across the basin
a few inches above the surface of the water, and it seemed as if he
looked at me.
I wondered with vague repugnance how anyone could regard him as a pet.
To me he was wholly repulsive, swollen, unhealthy looking.
"He knows me," said Mrs. Robinson, with a vain attempt at modesty. "He
has taken a fancy to me. Cupboard love I'm afraid, Dr. Giles. You see I
feed him every day. He just swims about or stays still if I am near,
like I am now, and he can see me. But if I am some way off and he can't
see me he tries to jump out to get to me. He never tries to jump when I
am near him. I call him Goldy, Dr. Giles, and I'm just as fond of him as
he is of me. Isn't it touching that a dumb creature should have such
affection? If it were a dog or a cat of course I could understand it,
and I once heard of a wolf that was loving, but I have always supposed
till now that fishes were cold by nature. I daresay, dear Dr.
Whittington told you about him? No! Well I am surprised, for he took
such an interest in Goldy. It was Dr. Whittington who made me put the
wire-netting over the aquarium. He said 'Some day that poor fellow will
jump out in your absence to try and get to you, and you will find him
dead on the carpet.' So we put the wire-netting across."
"He jumps," said the young girl gazing intently at the goldfish. "When
we sit playing cards in the evening he jumps again and again. But the
wire always throws him back."
I looked for the first time at Mrs. Robinson's daughter-in-law; her
colourless young face bent over the aquarium with an expression of
horror. And as I looked the luncheon bell rang, and with it arose a
clamour of invitation from Mrs. Robinson that I should stay for the
meal. Pot luck! Quite informal! etc., etc., but I wrenched myself away.
A few days later I called on my predecessor, Dr. Whittington, and
found him sitting in his garden at East Sheen. He was, as always,
communicative and genial, but it was evident that his interest in his
late patients had migrated to his roses.
"Mrs. Robinson is an egregious goose, my dear Giles, as you must have
already perceived, but she is a goose that lays golden eggs. You simply
can't go too often to please them. I went nearly every day, and they
constantly asked me to dinner. They have an excellent cook."
"They adored you," I said.
"They did; and some great writer has said somewhere that we must pay the
penalty for our deepest affections. I--ahem! exacted the penalty; you
see part of the results in my Malmaisons, and I advise you to follow in
my footsteps. They are made of money."
"They look it."
"And they are, if I may say so, a private preserve. They know nobody. I
always thought that everybody knew somebody, at any rate every one who
is wealthy, but they don't seem to know a soul. If you dine there you'll
meet a High Church parson whom they sit under, or the family solicitor,
or a servile female imbecile who was Arthur's governess, and laughs at
everything he says--no one else."
"Didn't he go to school?"
"Never. His mother said it would break his spirit. I've attended him
from his birth. A very costly affair _that_ was to Mrs. Robinson, for I
had to live in the house for weeks, in order to help to usher in young
Robinson, and at the same time usher out old Robinson, noisily dying of
locomotor ataxia, and drink on the ground floor. I've since come to the
conclusion that she never was legally his wife, and that is why they
know no one, and don't seem to make any effort socially. She had all the
money, there's no doubt of that, and she wasn't by any means in her
first youth. I rather think he must have been a bigamist or something
large hearted of that kind. Perhaps like Henry the Eighth he suffered
from a want of concentration of the domestic affections."
"And what is the son like, a malade imaginaire? I've never seen anything
like his dressing gowns except in futurist pictures."
"A malade imaginaire! Good Lord! no. Where are your professional eyes?
Arthur is his father's son, that is what is the matter with him.
Abnormal irritability and inertia, and a tendency to dessimated
sclerosis. He may have talent, I'm no judge of that; but he'll never do
anything. No sticking power. He's doomed. If ever any one was born under
an unlucky star that poor lad was. He began to cause a good deal of
anxiety when he was about twenty, made a determined attempt to go to
the devil: women, drink, drugs. In short, it looked at one moment as if
he would be his father over again without his father's vitality. His
mother was in despair. I said to her, 'My good woman, find him a wife; a
pretty young wife who will exert a good influence over him and keep him
straight.'"
"Apparently she followed your advice."
"She did. It was the only chance for him, and not a chance worth betting
on even then. I've often wondered how she found the girl. She makes no
end of a pet of her. She's a warmhearted old thing. She ought to have
had a dozen children, and a score of grandchildren. Introduce your wife
and family to her, Giles. She'll take to them at once. She's fond of all
young people. She's wrapped up in her son and daughter-in-law and--"
"Her goldfish?" I suggested.
"Her goldfish," assented Dr. Whittington, with a grin. "What an ass she
is. She actually believes the brute tries to jump out of the aquarium to
get to her."
"You encouraged her in that belief."
"My dear Giles," said my predecessor drily, "I have indicated to you the
path your feet should assiduously tread as regards the Robinsons. Now
come and look at my Blush Ramblers."
Dr. Whittington was right. The Robinson family was a gold mine. It is
not for me to say whether I resorted to a pick and shovel as he had
done, or whether, resisting temptation, I held the balance even between
my duty, and the natural cupidity of a man with an imperceptible income,
and three small children. At any rate I saw a great deal of the
Robinsons.
Arthur was a most interesting case, to which I brought a deep
professional interest. Perhaps also I was touched by his youth and good
looks, and felt compassion for the heavy handicap which life had laid
upon him. I strained every nerve to help him. Dr. Whittington had been
an old-fashioned somewhat narrow-minded practitioner close on seventy. I
was a young man, fresh from walking the hospitals. I used modern
methods, and they were at first attended with marked success. Mrs.
Robinson was at my feet. She regarded me, as did Arthur, as a
heaven-born genius. She openly blessed the day that had seen the
retirement of Dr. Whittington. She transferred her adoration from him to
me as easily as a book is transferred from one table to another. She
called on my wife; and instantly enfolded her and the children in her
capacious affections, and showered on us cream-cheeses, perambulators,
rocking-chairs, special brands of marmalade, "The Souls' Awakening" in a
plush and gilt frame, chocolate horses and dogs, eiderdown quilts and
her favourite selection from the works of Marie Corelli and Ella
Wheeler-Wilcox.
I began to think that Dr. Whittington had not put such an exorbitant
price on the practise as I had at first surmised.
I fought with all my strength for Arthur, and it was many months before
I allowed myself to realise that I was waging a losing battle. I had
unlimited funds at my disposal, the Robinson purse had apparently no
bottom to it. My word was law. What I ordered Mrs. Robinson obsequiously
carried out. Nevertheless, at last I had to own to myself that I was
vanquished. Arthur was doomed, as Dr. Whittington had said, and certain
sinister symptoms were making themselves more and more apparent. His
temper always moody and irritable, was becoming morose, vindictive, with
sudden outbursts of foolish mirth. The outposts were being driven in one
after another. I saw with profound discouragement that in time--perhaps
not for a long time if I could fend it off--his malady would reach the
brain.
I encouraged him to be much in the open air. I planned expeditions by
motor to Epping Forest, to Virginia Water, on which his young wife
accompanied him. She was constantly with him, walked with him, drove
with him, played patience with him, painted with him, or rather watched
him paint until the trembling of his hand obliged him to lay down his
brush. I hardly exchanged a word with her from one week's end to
another. She seemed a dutiful, docile, lifeless sort of person, without
any of the spontaneity and gaiety of youth. Mrs. Robinson owned to me
that fond as she was of her daughter-in-law, her companionship had not
done all she hoped for her son.
"So absent-minded, Dr. Giles, so silent, never keeps the ball rolling at
meals; the very reverse of chatty, I do assure you. I don't know what's
coming to young people now-a-days. In my youth," etc., etc.
Gradually I conceived a slight dislike to Blanche. She seemed
colourless, lethargic, one of those people who without vitality
themselves, sap that of others, and expect to be dragged through life by
the energy of those with whom they live. It was perfectly obvious that
fat and foolish Mrs. Robinson was the only person in the house with any
energy whatever.
Presently the whole family had influenza. Then for the first time I saw
Blanche alone. She was laid up with the malady at the same time as her
husband and mother-in-law. I went to her room, to see how she did, and
found her in bed.
She looked very small and young and wan, in an immense gilt four poster
with a magnificent satin quilt.
I reassured her as to her husband's condition, and then asked her a few
questions about herself, and told her that she would soon be well
again.
She gave polite answers, but again I had that first impression of her
that she was making an effort to keep her attention from wandering, that
she felt no interest in what I was saying.
"Have you an amusing book to pass the time?" I asked.
She looked at a pile on the table near her.
"Perhaps your eyes are too tired to read?"
"No," she said, "I had forgotten they were there. I don't care for
reading."
Her eyes left the books and travelled back to the other end of the large
ornate room, overfilled with richly gilt Empire furniture.
I turned and followed her rapt gaze.
There were half-a-dozen yellow chrysanthemums in a dull green jar on a
Buhl chiffonier. The slanting November sunshine fell on them, and threw
against the white wall a shadow of them. It was a shadow transfigured,
intricate yet vague, mysterious, beautiful exceedingly.
I should never have noticed it if she had not looked at it with such
intentness. For a moment I saw it with her eyes. I was touched; I hardly
knew why. All the apathy was gone from her face. There was passion in
it. She looked entirely exhausted, and yet it was the first time I had
seen her really alive.
The sunshine went out suddenly, and she sighed.
"You may get up to-morrow, and go downstairs," I said. "It is dull for
you alone up here."
"I like being here," she said.
Was she, like so many women, "contrary?" Always opposing the suggestions
of others, never willing to fall in with family arrangements.
"Don't you want to see the goldfish?" I hazarded, speaking as if to a
child. "He must be lonely now Mrs. Robinson is laid up. And who will
give him his crumbs?"
"No, I don't want to see him," she said passionately. "I never look at
him if I can help it. Oh Dr. Giles, everyone seems to shut their eyes
who comes into this house--everyone--but don't you see how dreadful it
is to be a prisoner?"
She looked at me with timid despairing eyes, which yet had a flicker of
hope in them. I patted her hand gently, and found she still had a little
fever.
"But he gets plenty of crumbs," I said soothingly, "and it is a nice
aquarium with fresh water running through all the time. I think he is a
very lucky goldfish."
She looked fixedly at me, and the faint colour in her cheeks faded, the
imploring look vanished from her eyes.
She leaned back among her lace pillows.
"That is what Mrs. Robinson says," she said with a quivering lip, and I
perceived that I was relegated to the same category in her mind as her
mother-in-law.
She withdrew her thin hand and retreated once more behind the frail
bastion of silence from which she had looked out at me for all these
months; from which she had for one moment emerged, only to creep back to
its forlorn shelter.
A few days later Mrs. Robinson was convalescent, sitting up in bed in a
garish cap festooned with cherry-coloured ribbons, and a silk wadded
jacket to match. I questioned her about her daughter-in-law, in whom for
the first time I felt interested. It needed no acumen on my part to draw
forth the whole of Blanche's short history. One slight question was all
that was necessary to turn on the cock of Mrs. Robinson's confidences.
The stream gushed forth at once, it overflowed, it could hardly be
turned off again. I was drenched.
"How long has Blanche been married? Two years, Dr. Giles. She's just
nineteen. That's her age--nineteen. Seventeen and three days when she
married. Such a romance. _She_ was seventeen and Arthur was twenty-two.
Five years difference. Just right, and you never saw two young people so
much in love with each other. And such a beautiful couple. It was a love
match. Made in heaven. Just like his father and me over again. That is
what I said to them. I said on their wedding day: 'Well, I hope you
will be as happy as your father and I were.'"
There was not much information to be retrieved from Mrs. Robinson's
gushings, but in the course of the next few days I hooked up out of a
flood of extraneous matter a few facts which had apparently escaped her
notice.
Blanche it seemed was the niece of a former Senior Curate of St.
Botolph's. "A splendid preacher, Dr. Giles, and a real churchman, high
mass and confession, and incense, just the priest for St. Botolph's, a
dedicated celibate and vegetarian--such a saintly example to us all."
It appeared obvious to me, though not to Mrs. Robinson, that the
vegetarian celebate had been embarrassed as to what to do with his
niece, when at the age of seventeen she had been suddenly left on his
hands owing to the inconvenient death of her widowed mother. Evidently
Blanche had not had a farthing.
"But he was such a wide-minded man. Of course he wanted dear Blanche to
lead the highest life, and to dedicate herself as he had done, and to go
into a sisterhood. But she cried all the time when he explained it to
her, and said she could not paint in a sisterhood. And she didn't seem
to fancy illuminating missals, or church embroidery, just what he had
thought she would like. He was always thinking what would make her
happy. And then it turned out there was some question of expense as well
which he had not foreseen, so he gave up the idea. And just at that time
I had a lot of trouble with Arthur--with drink--between you and me. It
was such a hot summer. I am convinced it was the heat that started it;
too much whiskey in the soda water--and other things as well. Arthur was
got hold of and led away. And Dr. Whittington advised me to find a nice
young wife for him. And I told Mr. Copton--that was the priest's name,
all about it--I always told him everything, and he was _most_ kind, and
interested, and so understanding, and he agreed a good wife was just
what Arthur wanted, and marriage was an honourable estate, those were
his very words. And Arthur was fond of painting, and Blanche was fond of
painting too, simply devoted to it, and they had lessons together in a
private studio and--"
It went on and on for ever.
"And her uncle gave her away. He was quite distressed that he could not
afford a trousseau, for he was Rector Designate of Saint Oressa's at
Liverpool, but I told him not to trouble about that. I gave her
everything just as if she had been my own child. I spent hundreds on her
trousseau, and she was married in my Brussels lace veil that I wore at
my own wedding. I just took to her as my own child from the first. And
would you believe it before he went away on his honeymoon, Arthur
brought me the goldfish to keep me company. In a bowl it was. Such a
quaint idea, wasn't it, so like Arthur. They are my two pets, Blanche
and Goldy."
I am not an artistic person, but even I was beginning to have doubts
about Arthur's talent. It seemed somehow unnatural that he was always
having his work enlarged by a third or a fifth, or both. Every picture
he had painted, before his hands trembled too much to hold a brush, was
faithfully copied and enlarged by his wife. She reproduced his dreary
compositions with amazing exactitude, working for hours together in a
corner of his studio, while he lay pallid, with half-closed eyes on the
black satin sofa, watching her.
I had always taken for granted they were a devoted couple. Mrs. Robinson
was always saying so, and it was obvious that Arthur never willingly
allowed his wife out of his sight.
However, one morning I came into the studio when there was trouble
between them. I saw at once it was one of his worst days.
He was standing before an enlargement of one of his pictures livid with
anger.
"How often am I to to tell you that a copy must be exact," he stammered
in his disjointed staccato speech. "If you quote a line of poetry do
you alter one of the words? If I trust you to reproduce a picture surely
you know you are not at liberty to change it."
She was as pale as he was. She looked dully at him, and then at her own
canvas on the easel.
"I forgot," she said, in a suffocated voice.
I looked at the original and the copy, and even my stolid heart beat a
little quicker.
The original represented a young girl--his wife had evidently sat for
him--playing on a harp, while a man listened, leaning against a table,
with a bowl of chrysanthemums upon it.
The copy was much larger than the original, and its wooden smugness was
faithfully reproduced. The faulty drawing of the two figures seemed to
have been accentuated by doubling its size. It was an amazingly exact
reproduction, except in one particular. In Blanche's copy she had made
the shadow of the chrysanthemums fall upon the wall. It was a wonderful,
a mysterious shadow, _I had seen it before_.
"I hadn't indicated the slightest shadow," Arthur continued. "There is
no sunshine in the room. You have deliberately falsified my
composition."
"I did it without thinking," said Blanche shivering. "It is a mistake."
"A mistake," he said sullenly. "Your heart isn't in your work, that is
the truth. You don't really care to help me to find my true
expression."
And he took the canvas from the easel and tore it in two.
Did he half know, did some voice in the back of his twisted brain cry
out to him that his part of the picture was hopelessly mediocre and out
of drawing, that the only value it possessed was the shadow of the
chrysanthemums? Was there jealousy in his rage? Who shall say!
I butted in at this point, and made a pretext for sending Blanche out of
the room.
"Now, my dear fellow," I said confidentially, "don't in future try to
associate your wife with your art. It is quite beyond her. Women, sir,
have no artistic feeling. The home, dress, amusement that is their
department. 'Occupy till I come,' might well have been said of feminine
talent. It does occupy--till--ahem! _we_ arrive. When a woman is happily
married like your wife she doesn't care a fig for anything else. Let her
share your lighter moments, your walks and drives, allow her to solace
your leisure. The bow, sir, must not be always at full stretch. But
promise me you won't allow her to copy any more of your pictures."
"Never again," said Arthur sepulchrally, stretched face downwards on the
satin sofa.
I picked up the two pieces of torn canvas. A sudden idea seized me.
"And now," I said, "I shall say a few words of reprimand to Mrs.
Robinson. You need not fear that I shall be too severe with her."
Arthur made no movement, and I left him, and after taking the torn
picture to my car I climbed to the top of the house where I suspected I
should find Blanche.
Her mother-in-law had reluctantly given her leave to use an attic lumber
room, and, amid a litter of old trunks and derelict furniture and
cardboard boxes, she had made a little clearing near the window, where
she worked feverishly at her painting in her rare leisure.
I had seen the room once when I had helped the nurse to carry down a
screen put away there, and suddenly needed in one of Arthur's many
illnesses. I had been touched by the evident attempt to make some sort
of refuge in that large house, where there were several empty rooms on
the lower floors, but--perhaps--no privacy.
I quickly found that Mrs. Robinson tacitly disapproved of Blanche
working in the attic. Her kind face became almost hard when she spoke of
the hours her daughter-in-law spent there, when her sick husband wanted
her downstairs.
I tapped at the door, but there was no answer, and I went in. Blanche
was sitting near the window on a leather trunk.
I expected to find her distressed, but her eyes, as they were raised to
meet mine, were untroubled. An uncomprehending calm dwelt in them. I
saw that she had already forgotten her husband's anger in her complete
absorption in something else.
For the first time it struck me that her mental condition was not quite
normal. Had she then no memory; or did she continually revert, as soon
as she was left to herself to some world of her own imagination, where
her harassed, bewildered soul was refreshed? I remembered the look I had
often seen in her face, the piteous expression of one anxiously
endeavouring and failing to fix her attention.
She was giving the whole of it now to a picture on a low easel before
her. I drew near and looked at it also.
It was a portrait of the goldfish. It was really exactly like him with
his eye turned up on the look out for crumbs. He was outlined against a
charming assortment of foreign shells, strewn artistically on a zinc
floor. The aquarium was encircled by a pretty little grove of cowslips
and primroses, which gave the picture a cheerful and pleasing aspect.
"It is lovely," I said.
"He is a lucky goldfish, isn't he?" she said apathetically.
I pondered long that night over Blanche. I reproached myself that I had
not perceived earlier that she was overwrought. When I came to think of
it her life was deeply overshadowed by her husband's illness. Was it
possible that she was the more talented of the two, and that it was not
congenial to her to spend so much of her time docilely copying Arthur's
pictures? I had never thought of that before. I knew nothing about art
myself, but I could find out. I was becoming much more occupied by this
time, and one of my patients was the celebrated artist, M., whose slow
death I was trying to make as painless as possible.
A day or two later I laid before him the picture Arthur had torn in two.
I can still see M. sitting in his arm-chair in the ragged dressing gown
which he wore day and night, unshaved, wrinkled, sixty.
He threw the larger half of the canvas on the floor, and held the piece
containing the chrysanthemums and their shadow in his thin shaking talon
of a hand, moving it now nearer now further away from his half blind
blood-shot eyes.
I began to explain that only the chrysanthemums were by the wife of the
painter of the picture, but he brushed me aside.
"She can see," he said at last. "And she's honest. I was honest once.
She can't always say all she sees--who can--but she sees _everything_.
Bring me something more of hers."
Reader, after immense cogitation I decided to take him two of Arthur's
compositions, the couple which after hours of agitated vacillation he
considered to be his best. They were all spread out in his studio, and I
had to assist in his decision. He had on several occasions--knowing I
attended the great man--hinted to me that he should like M. to see his
work and advise him upon it, but I had never taken the hint. Mrs.
Robinson was only surprised that he had not pressed to see her son's
pictures earlier. She and Arthur evidently thought I had kept them from
the famous painter's notice until now, as, indeed, I had.
"And I must take something of yours too," I said kindly to Blanche as
she put the two selected works of art into a magnificent portfolio.
"Yes, indeed," said Mrs. Robinson. "Blanche paints sweetly too, but
mostly copies. She's a wonderful hand at copying."
"I have nothing," said Blanche, "except the goldfish."
"Then I must take him," I said. This was regarded as a great joke by
Arthur and his mother, and they could hardly believe I was in earnest
until I sent Blanche for it.
"It's Goldy to the very life," said Mrs. Robinson fondly, "and the
shells and everything exact. Such a beautiful home for him."
Arthur looked gloomily at the little picture, and for a moment I thought
he would forbid my taking it, but I wrapped it up with decision, put it
in the portfolio with the others, and departed.
I found M. as usual in his armchair in his studio, leaning back livid
and breathless, endeavouring so he whispered "to get forward with his
dying."
I assured him he was getting forward at a great pace.
"Not quick enough for me, Giles," he said, "and you won't help me out,
d---- you."
I put the goldfish on a chair in front of him. He looked at it for some
moments without seeing it, and then reared himself slowly in his chair.
He began to speak in his broken husky voice, and for an instant I
thought he had gone mad.
"Ha!" he said, leaning forward towards the picture. "You're portrayed,
sir. Your unsympathetic personality, your unhealthy spots, your dorsal
redness, and your abdominal pallor, your sullen eye turned upwards to
your captors and their crumbs, all these are rendered with lynx-eyed
fidelity. Privacy is not for you. Like Marie Antoinette, you are always
in the full view of your gaolers."
He paused to take breath.
"This is England, a free country where we lock into tiny prisons for our
amusement the swiftest of God's creatures, birds, squirrels, rabbits,
mice, fishes. You are silhouetted against a background of incongruous
foreign shells strewn on a zinc floor: the nightmare of a mad
conchologist. What tenderness, what beauty in the cowslips and
primroses which encircle your prison and almost hide the iron
grating--but not quite. The rapture of Spring is in them. They bloom,
they bloom, every bud is opening. The contrast between their joyous
immobility and your enforced immobility is complete. Nothing remains to
you, to you once swift, once beautiful, once free, nothing remains to
you in your corpulent despair except--the pleasures of the table."
M. leaned back exhausted, trembling a little.
"It is certainly a work of the imagination," I hazarded, "if you can
read all that into it."
"Giles, my good fellow, confine yourself to your own sphere, how to keep
in life against my will and all laws of humanity my miserable worn out
carcase. That is not a work of the imagination. It is the work of close
and passionate observation, observation so close, and of such integrity
that it fears nothing, evades nothing. It is tremendous."
There was a moment's silence. I was a little hurt. I knew I was ignorant
about art, but after all I had brought the picture to M.'s notice.
"How old is she?"
"Nineteen."
"I've never had a pupil, but if I could live a few months longer I would
take her. I suppose she's starving. I nearly starved at her age. I'll
give her a hundred for it, and I'll see to its future. Send her round
here to-morrow morning." He scrawled and flung me a cheque for a hundred
guineas.
"Now, understand," I said, "I will bring the girl to see you to-morrow
on one condition only, that you buy her husband's 'Last Farewell,'
and 'The dawn of love' for fifty pounds each. They are in this
portfolio--and 'The Goldfish' by his wife for five. Is that a bargain?"
"If you say so it is. You always get your own way. I suppose he's
jealous of her."
"He's just beginning to be, and he doesn't do things by halves."
Perhaps the happiest moment of poor Arthur's tawdry inflamed existence
was when I told him that the great M. had bought his pictures. The
latent suspicion and smouldering animosity died out of his eyes. He
became radiant, boyish, for the moment sane. Perhaps he had looked like
that before the shadow fell. Blanche, too, was suffused with delight.
Mrs. Robinson, hurrying in with an armful of lilac orchids, was
overjoyed. She burst forth in loud jubilation, not unlike the screeches
of the London "syrens" when they herald the coming in of the New Year.
She it seemed had _always_ known, _always_ seen her boy's genius. He
would get into the Academy now, from which jealousy had so long kept him
out. He would be hung on the line. He would be recognised. He would be
as great as M. himself, greater, for she and others among her friends
had never fancied his pictures. They had not the lofty moral tone of
Arthur's.
I produced the cheque.
"One hundred pounds for Arthur," I said, "and five pounds for the
goldfish."
Blanche started violently and looked incredulously at me.
Arthur's jaw dropped. Then he said patronizingly, "Well done, Blanche,"
and leaned back pallid and exhausted on the satin couch.
"I must see him," he said over and over again as his mother laid a warm
rug over his knees, and his wife put a cushion behind his head. "He
could tell me things, tricks of the trade. Art is all a trick."
"He found no fault with your work," I said, "but--don't be discouraged,
Blanche--he did criticise yours. He said you could not put down all you
saw."
"What have I always told you, Blanche?" said Arthur solemnly. "You put
down what you _don't_ see. Look at that shadow where I had not put one."
"He is really too ill to see anyone, but he will speak to Blanche for a
few minutes." I turned to her. "You must not mind if he is severe. He
is a drastic critic. Would you like to put on your hat and come with me?
I am going on to him now."
I had some difficulty in getting her out of the house. Mrs. Robinson
wanted to come too. Arthur was determined that she should wait till he
was better, and they could go together. But I had long since established
my authority in that household. I had my way.
Blanche asked no questions as we drove along. She did not seem the least
surprised that the greatest painter of his day had bought her husband's
pictures. Was she lacking in intelligence? Was there some tiny screw
loose in her mind?
M. had not made a toilet as I half expected he would. When we came in he
was standing with his back to us, leaning against the mantelpiece, his
unshaved chin on his hands. His horrible old dressing gown, stained with
paint, and showing numerous large patches of hostile colours, clung to
him more tightly than ever. His decrepitness struck me afresh. He
looked what, indeed, he was, an old and depraved man, repulsive,
formidable--unwashed--a complex wreck, dying indomitably on his feet.
"And so you can do things like that," he said, turning towards Blanche a
face contracted with pain, and pointing a lean finger at the goldfish,
and the chrysanthemum shadow, propped side by side on the mantel piece.
"Yes."
"Where were you taught?"
She mentioned the school where she had studied.
"Why did you leave it?"
"Because Mother died, and I had not any money to go on with my
education."
"And so you married for a home I suppose," he snarled, showing his black
teeth, "for silken gowns and delicate fare and costly furs such as you
are wearing now."
She did not answer.
"You had better have gone on the streets and stuck to your painting."
Blanche's dark eyes met the painter's horrible leer without flinching.
"I wish I had," she said.
They had both forgotten me. They were intent upon each other.
And she who never spoke about herself said to this stranger:
"I married because I did not want to go into a sisterhood, and because
Arthur said he understood what I felt about painting, and that he felt
the same, and that when we were married we would both study under S.,
and I was grateful to him, and I thought I loved him. But S. would not
take him and wanted to take me. And Arthur was dreadfully angry, and
would not let me go without him. And the years passed, hundreds and
hundreds of years, and Arthur changed to me. And he has to be humoured.
And now--I copy his pictures. I enlarge them. Sometimes I decrease them,
but not often. He likes to watch me doing them. He does not care for me
to be doing anything else."
There was a long silence.
They stood looking at each other, and it seemed as if the sword that had
pierced her soul pierced his also.
"Leave all and follow me," said the painter at last. "That is the voice
of art, as well as of Jesus of Nazareth. That is the law. There is no
middle course. You have not left all, you have not followed. You have
dallied and faltered and betrayed your gift. You have denied your Lord.
And your sin has found you out. You are miserable; you deserve to be
miserable."
She made no answer.
"But you are at the end of your tether. I know what I know. You can't go
on. You are nineteen and your life is unendurable to you. You are
touching the fringe of despair. Break away from your life before it
breaks you. Shake its dust from off your feet. Forsake all and find
peace in following your art."
"You might as well say to the goldfish, jump out," said Blanche, white
to the lips, pointing to the picture.
"I do say to him, 'Jump out.' Leap in the dark, and risk dying on a
vulgar Axminster carpet, and being trodden into it, rather than pine in
prison on sponge cake."
"Yes," said Blanche fiercely, "but there is the wire netting. It's not
in the picture, but _you know it's there_. He jumps and jumps. Haven't I
said so in the picture! And it throws him back. You know that. I was
like him once. I used to jump, but I always fell back. I don't jump any
more now."
And then, without any warning, she burst into a paroxysm of tears.
For a moment I stared at her stupified, and then slipped out of the room
to fetch a glass of water.
When I came back M. was sunk down in his armchair, and she was crouching
on the ground before him almost beside herself, holding him by the feet.
"Let me live with you," she gasped half distraught. "Arthur hates me,
and I'm frightened of him. He's mad, mad, mad, only Dr. Giles pretends
he isn't, and Mrs. Robinson pretends; everything in that dreadful house
is pretence, nothing real anywhere. Let me live with you. Then he'll
divorce me, and you needn't marry me. I don't want to be married. I
won't be any trouble to you. No pretty clothes, no amusements, no
expense. I don't want anything except a little time to myself, to
paint."
"You poor soul," said the painter faintly, and in his harsh voice was an
infinite compassion.
"Help me to jump out," she shrieked, clinging to him.
"My child," he said. "I cannot help you. I am dying. I could not live
long enough even to blacken your name. I have failed others in the past
whom I might have succoured. Now I fail you as I failed them. There is
no help in me."
He closed his eyes, but nevertheless two very small tears crept from
beneath the wrinkled lids, and stood in the furrows of his cheeks.
She trembled and then rose slowly to her feet, and obediently took the
glass of water which I proffered to her. She drank a little, and then
placed the glass carefully on the table and drew on her gloves. I saw
that she had withdrawn once more after a terrible bid for freedom into
her fortress of reserve. She was once more the impassive, colourless
creature whom I had seen almost daily for a year without knowing in the
least until to-day what she really was.
"I ought to be going back now," she said to me.
"I will take you home," I said.
She went slowly up to M. and stood before him. I had never seen her look
so beautiful.
The old man looked at her fixedly.
"I made up my mind," she said, "after I spoke to Dr. Giles that I would
never try to jump out any more, but you see I did."
"Forgive me," he said brokenly, holding out a shaking hand.
"It's not your fault," she said, clasping his hand in both of hers. "You
are good, and you understand. You are the only person I have ever met
who would help me if you could. But no one can help me. No one."
And very reverently, very tenderly, she kissed his leaden hand and laid
it down upon his knee.
As I took Blanche home I said to her:
"And when did you appeal to me, and when did I repulse you?"
"When I spoke to you about Goldy and you weren't sorry, you did not mind
a bit. You only said he was a lucky goldfish."
"And what in Heaven's name had that to do with you?"
She looked scornfully at me as if she were not going to be entrapped
into speaking again.
I saw that she had--so to speak--ruled me out of her life. Perhaps when
I first came to that unhappy house nearly a year ago she had looked to
me as a possible helper, had weighed me in the balance, and had found me
wanting.
I was cut to the heart, for deep down, at the bottom of my mind I saw at
last, that I _had_ failed her.
She might be, she probably was, slightly deranged, but, nevertheless,
she had timidly, obscurely sought my aid, and had found no help in me.
M. died the following evening, after trying to die throughout the whole
day. I never left him until, at last, late at night, he laid down his
courage, having no further need of it, and reached the end of his
ordeal.
Next morning after breakfast I went as usual to the Robinson's house,
and, according to custom, was shown into the drawing-room. Now that M.
was out of his agony my mind reverted to Blanche. My wife and children
were going to the seaside, and my wife had eagerly agreed to take
Blanche with her, if she could be spared.
"But they won't let her go," said the little woman.
"They must if I say it's necessary," I said with professional dignity. I
wondered as I waited in the immense Robinson drawing-room how best I
could introduce the subject. Half involuntarily I approached the
aquarium. As I drew near my foot caught on something slippery and stiff.
I looked down, and saw it was the dead body of the goldfish on the
carpet. I picked it up, and was staring at it when Mrs. Robinson came
in. She gave a cry when she saw it, and wrung her hands.
"Put him back in the water," she shrieked. "He may be still alive."
I put him back into his cell, but it had no longer any power over that
poor captive. "Goldy" floated grotesque and upside down on the surface
of the water. His release had come.
"He must have jumped out to get to me when I was not there," sobbed Mrs.
Robinson, the easy tears coursing down her fat cheeks. "My poor faithful
loving little pet. But someone has taken the wire off the aquarium. Who
could have been so wicked? Downright cruel I call it."
The wire, true enough, had been unhooked, and was laid among the
hyacinths on the water's edge.
"Where is Blanche?" I asked. "I want to talk to you about her. I do not
think she is well, and I should advise--"
"That was just what I was going to tell you when I came in and saw that
poor little darling dead in your hand. I am dreadfully worried about
Blanche. She has been out all night. She hasn't come in yet."
"Out all night?" A vague trouble seized me.
"Yes," said Mrs. Robinson, "all night. Would you have thought it
possible? But between you and me it's not the first time. Once long ago,
just before you came to us, she did just the same. She--actually--ran
away: ran away from her husband and me, and her beautiful home, though
we had done everything in the world to make her happy. She went to her
uncle at Liverpool, who never liked her. He telegraphed to us at once,
and he brought her back next day. He spoke to her most beautifully, and
left her with us. She seemed quite dazed at first, but she got round it
and became as usual, always very silent and dull. Not the companion for
Arthur. No brightness or gaiety. Blanche has been a great disappointment
to me, tho' I've never shown it, and I'm not one to bear malice, I've
always made a pet of her. But between you and me, Dr. Giles, Arthur is
convinced that she is not quite right in her head, and that she ought to
be shut up."
"But she is shut up now," I said involuntarily.
She stared at me amazed.
A servant brought in a telegram.
"I telegraphed to her uncle first thing this morning," said Mrs.
Robinson, "to ask if she was with him. Now we shall hear what he says."
She opened the envelope and spread out the contents.
"She's _not_ with him," she said. "Then Dr. Giles, where _is_ she? Where
can she be?"
Later in the day we knew that Blanche had taken refuge in the
Serpentine.
The two pets had fled together. She had made the way of escape easy for
her weaker brother.
* * * * *
It was early in May. There was the usual crush at the Academy. I elbowed
my way through the crowd to look at Serjeant's majestic portrait of M.
Near it on the line hung the picture of the goldfish.
A long-haired student and a little boy were staring at it.
"Mummy," said the child, running to a beautifully dressed slender woman
looking at the Serjeant, "I want a goldfish, too."
"Well, darling, you shall have one," she said, and, turning to the young
man who accompanied her, she added, "You never saw a child so fond of
animals as Cedric."
The Stars in their Courses
I was always somewhat amazed when I came to think of it, but I hardly
ever did think of it, that my cousin, Jimmy Cross, should have married
Gertrude Bingham. There seemed no reason for such a desperate step on
his part. But if one is going to be taken aback by the alliances of
one's friends and relations one would journey through life in a
continual state of astonishment, and the marriage service especially
exhorts the married "not to be afraid with any amazement," which shows
that that is the natural emotion evoked by contemplation of the holy
estate, and that it is our duty not to give way to it.
I said there seemed no reason for the lethargic Jimmy to take this step,
especially as he had been married before, and had enjoyed a serene
widowhood for some years. But what I forgot was that he never did take
any step at all in either marriage. He just sat still.
The first time his Mother arranged everything, and the result, if dull,
was not actually unpleasant.
The second time Gertrude Bingham took all the necessary steps with
precision and determination. Now and then it certainly seemed as if he
would take alarm and run away, but he did not. He remained seated.
It is as impossible for a man rooted in inertia to achieve a marriage
which implies an effort, as it is for him to evade a marriage, the
avoidance of which requires an effort. He remains recumbent both when he
ought to pursue and when he ought to fly. He is the prey of energetic
kidnappers.
Gertrude was a great astrologer and conversed in astrological terms,
which I repeat, but which I don't pretend to understand. She told me
(after the wedding) that when she discovered that Jimmy's moon in the
house of marriage was semi-sextile to her Venus she had known from the
first that their union was inevitable. I think Jimmy felt it so too, and
that it was no use struggling. To put it mildly, she placed no obstacles
in the way of this inevitable union, and it took place amid a general
chorus of rather sarcastic approval from both families.
What a mother Gertrude would make to Joan, Jimmy's rather spoilt girl of
twelve, what a wife to Jimmy himself, what an excellent influence in the
parish, what an energetic addition to our sleepy neighbourhood. We were
told we were going to be stirred up. I never met the second Mrs. Cross
till Jimmy brought her down as a bride to call on me in my cottage near
his park gates. She at once inspired me with all the terror which very
well-dressed people with exactly the right hair and earrings always
arouse in me. She was good-looking, upright, had perfect health and
teeth and circulation, did breathing exercises, had always just finished
the book of the moment, and was ready with an opinion on it, not a
considered opinion--but an opinion. During her first call I discovered
that she had, for many years, held strong views about the necessity of
school life for only children, and was already on the look-out for a
seminary for Joan.
"It is in her horoscope," she said to me, as we walked in my orchard
garden, too much engrossed with Joan's future to notice my wonderful
yellow lupins. "Her Mercury and ruling planet are in Aquarius, and that
means the companionship of her own age. I shall not delay a day in
finding the best school that England can produce."
I need hardly say that such an establishment protruded itself on to Mrs.
Cross's notice, with the greatest celerity, and thither the long-legged
nail-biting, pimply, round-shouldered Joan repaired, and became a
reformed character, with a clear complexion and a back almost as flat as
her step-mother's.
"Wonderful woman," Jimmy used to say somewhat ruefully to me, sitting
on the low stone wall which divides my little velvet lawn from my bit of
woodland. "Gertrude has been the making of Joan."
"And of you, too, my dear Jimmy," I remarked.
He sighed.
It was perfectly true. She had been the making of him, just as she had
been the making of the Manor garden, of the boot and shoe club, the
boys' carving class, the Confirmation candidates' reading class, the
mothers' working parties, the coal club, the Church members' lending
library. The only misgiving that remained in one's mind after she had
been the making of all these things was that it seemed a pity that they
were all so obviously machine-made, turned out to pattern.
Personally, I should have preferred that they should have been treated
less conventionally, or let alone. My own course and Jimmy's would, of
course, have been to have left them alone. We left everything alone. But
Gertrude always had a ready-made scheme for everything and everybody.
She even had a scheme of salvation into which the Deity was believed to
be compressed. I did not mind much the industrious efforts she expended
on Jimmy, who was now an inattentive Magistrate and member of the County
Council, and wobbly chairman of his own Parish Council, writing an
entirely illegible hand, which perhaps did not matter much as he never
answered letters. But I felt acutely distressed when she reconstructed
the rambling old Manor garden entirely. All its former pleasant
characteristics were wrenched out of it. It was drawn and quartered, and
then put together anew in compartments. It contained everything; a
Japanese garden, a rock garden, a herb garden, a sunk garden, a
wilderness, a rose garden, a pergola, three pergolas, just as the
village now contained, a boot club, a coal club, a--but I think I have
said that before.
In the course of time she presented Jimmy with two most remarkable
children, at least she said they were remarkable: and from their
horoscopes I gathered the boy would probably become a prime minister,
and the girl a musical genius. We don't actually know yet what form
their greatness will take, for as I write this they are still greedy,
healthy children, who come out in plum-pudding rash regularly at
Christmas.
I knew her well by the time the garden had been given its _coup de
grâce_, and I told her after I had been dragged all over it that she had
a constructive mind. (I have never been a particularly truthful person,
but my career as a liar dates from Jimmy's marriage with Gertrude.)
My remark pleased her. She smiled graciously and said, "Ah, I had not
got Mars rising in Capricorn for nothing when I was born."
As we became more intimate she insisted on drawing out my horoscope, and
after a week of intense mental activity produced a sort of cart wheel on
paper at which I looked with respectful misgiving.
"I hope it does not say anything about my living anywhere except here,"
I said anxiously.
I had long had a fear at the back of my mind that she might need my
cottage for some benevolent scheme. Jimmy, who had always been fond of
me, had let it to me at a nominal rent in his easygoing widower days,
because the mild climate suited my rheumatism, and my society suited
him. Round the cottage had gradually sprung up what many, though not
Gertrude, considered a beautiful garden.
"No travelling at all," she said, "no movement of any kind. And I am
afraid, Anne, I can't hold out the slightest hope of a marriage for
you."
"Since I turned forty I had begun to fear I might remain unwedded," I
remarked.
"No sign of marriage," she said, exploring the cart wheel, "and there
must have been considerable lethargy in the past when openings of this
kind did occur. Your Venus seems for many years to have been in square
to Neptune, and that would tend to make these chances slip away from
you."
"I endeavoured to pounce on them," I said humbly. "My dear mother's
advice to me as to matrimony was 'clutch while you can'--I assure you I
left no stone unturned."
"In that case you probably turned the wrong ones," she said judicially.
"And I am sorry to tell you that I don't see any good fortune coming to
you either, and rather bad health. In short, you will have a severe
illness next spring. March especially will be a bad month for you. Your
Moon will be going through Virgo, the sign of sickness."
It generally was. I don't mean my moon, but March. I rarely got through
the winter without an attack of rheumatism at the end of it.
All in a moment, as it seemed to me, after a few springs and autumns and
attacks of rheumatism, Gertrude's two children were leaving the nursery,
and Joan was returning home from school to be introduced into society.
Gertrude began to look round for a governess who would also be a
companion for Joan. I helped her to find one. It was a case of nepotism.
I recommended my own niece, Dulcibella, who had just returned from the
completion of her education at Dresden. Dulcibella's impecunious parents
had, of course, both died and left her to battle with life--and me,
alone, her only heritage being a wild rose prettiness and dark eyes like
an Alderney calf's.
She was well educated. I had been able to achieve that owing to the
cheap rate at which I lived, thanks to Jimmy. But I had thoroughly made
up my mind that I was not going to have her twirling her thumbs under my
roof. She was close on eighteen, and must now earn her own living.
She was staying with me on a visit when Gertrude told me of her
requirements. Gertrude's two stout children were at that moment sitting
on the lawn blowing soap bubbles with Dulcibella. Jimmy had been engaged
in the same pursuit as his offspring five minutes earlier, but had
departed. Gertrude looked at the group critically.
"Your niece does not look strong," she said dubiously.
"She isn't."
"Or energetic."
"She's not."
"Is she really firm with children?"
"I should not think so, but you are a better judge of character than I
am."
Conscience pricked as I said the words, but I had become inured to its
prickings.
"I have, of course, studied human nature," she said slowly, still
looking at the pretty group on the lawn.
I have not yet met a fellow creature who does not think he has studied
human nature. Yet how few turn the pages of that open book. And out of
that few the greatest number scan it upside down.
"I could make a truer estimate," she continued, "if I drew out her
horoscope. I go by that more than by my own fallible judgment. I may
err, but I have never known astrology to fail."
* * * * *
Dulcie was duly engaged as governess on approval for three months, on
the strength of her horoscope. Before she went to the Manor House I made
a few remarks to her to which she listened decorously, her eyes
reverently fixed on my face.
"You will leave with me that remarkably pretty lilac muslin you appeared
in yesterday--and the sun-bonnet. You will make yourself look as like a
district visitor as possible, thick where you ought to be thin, and thin
where you ought to be thick. Don't cry, Dulcie. I am endeavouring to
help you. Be thankful you have an aunt like me. Who educated you?"
"You did." Sob. Sob.
"Well, now I am finishing your education. You want to earn your living,
I suppose. You know that I only have a small annuity, that I have not a
farthing to leave you."
"Yes, yes, Aunt Anne."
"Well, then, don't look prettier than that square Joan, and don't let
the wave in your hair show."
The Alderney calf eyes brimmed anew with tears. Dulcie drooped her pin
of a head. Like that defunct noodle, her mother, she lived solely for
clothes and poetry and the admiration of the uncorseted sex. She had
come into the world a little late. She conformed to the best Victorian
ideals, but there are men still lurking in secluded rural districts if
one could but find them, to whom her cheap appeal might be irresistible.
I had hopes she might secure a husband if she took a country engagement.
I proceeded with my discourse. It spread over Jimmy as well. I did not
bid her pure eyes look into depths of depravity but I did make her
understand that Mrs. Cross was becoming rather stout and middle-aged,
and that if Mr. Cross blew soap bubbles in the schoolroom too
frequently, she, Dulcie, might find that her French accent was not good
enough for her young charges.
Dulcie has not the faintest gleam of humour, but she is docility itself.
She appeared next day staid, flat-figured, almost unpretty, her
wonderful hair smoothed closely over her small ears.
I blessed her, and said as a parting word:
"Take an interest in astrology."
And then the gardener wheeled her luggage on the barrow to the Manor,
and Dulcie crept timidly behind it to her first situation.
In order that this tragic story, for it is a tragedy, should not expand
into a novel, I will say at once that she was a complete success. That
was because she did exactly as I told her. As a rule, very silly people
never will do what they are told. But in that one point Dulcie was no
fool.
She was lamentably weak with the children. She had no art of teaching.
She did not encourage Joan to preserve a burnished mind, but she took to
astrology like a duck to water. From the first she was deeply interested
in it, and believed in it with flawless credulity.
"Dulcie," said Gertrude with approval, "has a very alert mind for one so
young. Joan has never taken the faintest interest in astrology, but
Dulcie shows an intelligent grasp of the subject. She studies it while
the children are preparing their syntax. You, yourself, Anne, have never
in all these years mastered even the elements of the science. I don't
believe you know what _an aspect_ means."
"I don't pretend to a powerful mind."
"Your difficulty is the inertia that belongs to a low vitality," said
Gertrude, "and I rather think that is what is the matter with Joan. She
hardly opens a book. She has not an idea beyond her chickens. She spends
hours among her coops."
"Dulcie's horoscope," continued Gertrude after a pause, "shows a marked
expansion in her immediate future. The wider life which she has entered
upon under our roof is no doubt the beginning of it. I feel it my duty
to help her in every way I can."
"Dear Gertrude," I said. "_Thank you._ My poor motherless child, for
whom I can do but little has found a powerful friend in you."
Conscience jabbed me as with a knitting needle, but I paid no more
attention to it than the Spartan boy to his fox.
"There is certainly a love affair in her near future," continued
Gertrude affably. "_She_ says that astrologically she can't see any such
thing for several years to come, but I know better. I found him under
Uranus, transiting her Venus. She is an extremely intelligent pupil, but
she is certainly obstinate. She _won't_ see it. But she can see Joan's
engagement and marriage quite clearly. We both see that. But I am
convinced Dulcie has an opportunity of marrying as well as Joan. Her
moon will shortly be going through the fifth house, the house of lovers
which speaks for itself. I wondered whether it might possibly be Mr.
Wilson. Most respectable--you know--Mr. Benson's pupil. He's always
coming over on one pretext or another, to play tennis or see Joan's
chickens. I saw him walking back through the park with Dulcie and the
children the other day."
I pretended to be horrified.
"I will speak to her," I mumbled, "most reprehensible."
"I beg you will do nothing of the kind," said Gertrude with asperity.
"The world moves on, my dear Anne, while you sit dreaming in your
cottage; and if you can't raise a finger to help your own niece then
don't try to nullify the benevolent activities of those who can."
"Of course, Gertrude, if you look at it in that way. But a governess!"
"I do look at it in that way; and allow me to tell you, Anne, that you
dress her abominably, and I have advised her to revolt. And her hair! I
spoke to her about it yesterday, and she said you liked her to plaster
it down like that. The child has beautiful hair, very like mine at her
age. It needs releasing. It is not necessary that she should imitate
your severe coiffure."
"Oh! Gertrude, I always brush my own hair back, and surely it is not too
much to ask of my brother's only child who owes everything to me to--" I
became tearful.
"It _is_ too much to ask. You are an egoist, Anne. The poor child looked
quite frightened when I spoke to her yesterday. You mean well, but you
have repressed her. I intend, on the contrary, to draw her out, to widen
her narrowed, pinched existence." Gertrude had said the same of Jimmy
when she married him. Everyone had a pinched existence till she dawned
on them, though it would have been difficult to say who had dared to
pinch Jimmy.
Next day Dulcie came down half frightened, wholly delighted, to confer
with me.
"My dear," I said. "Do exactly what kind Mrs. Cross wishes about your
hair and dress and general deportment. I can't explain, it would take
too long, and when I had explained you would not understand. You may now
take back with you the lilac gown and the sun-bonnet. And, by the way,
what is this Mr. Wilson like who is always coming over?"
"Very, _very_ nice"--with fervour.
"And handsome?"
"Very, _very_ handsome."
"H'm! Now, Dulcie, no nonsense such as you ladled out to me about Herr
Müller, the music master at Dresden. You needn't cry. That is all past
and forgotten. But I want a plain answer. Does this very handsome man
care about chickens?"
"Yes, yes, Aunt Anne. He has taken several prizes."
"Does he come to see you, or Joan?"
Dulcie cogitated.
"At first it was Joan," she said.
Light broke in on me. _That serpent Gertrude!_ She did not think the
poultry fancier good enough for the stolid Joan, but quite good enough
for my exquisite Dulcibella.
"I must go back now," said Dulcie. "I'm dining down because Mr. Cross
likes a game of patience in the evening. It keeps him from falling
asleep. Mr. Wilson is staying to dinner. I'm going to wear my amber
muslin, and Mr. Vavasour is coming to stay. We've seen a good deal of
him lately. Mrs. Cross says he has had a very overshadowed life with his
old mother, and she wants to help him to a wider sphere."
I pricked up my ears.
"Is he Vavasour, of Harlington?"
"Yes, that's his home, near Lee on the Solent."
"But surely he is quite an infant."
"I don't know what you mean by an infant, Aunt Anne. He is two years
older than me, and he simply _loves_ poetry."
"And is he as nice as Mr. Wilson?"
"Very, _very_ nice."
Further lights were bursting in. The illumination momentarily staggered
me.
"H'm. Dulcie, you will now attend to what I tell you."
"Yes, yes, Aunt Anne. I always do."
"Now, mind you don't make eyes at Mr. Wilson, who is Joan's friend. That
is what horrid little cats of girls do, not what I expect of _you_.
Chickens draw people together in a way, ahem! you don't understand,
but--you will later on."
"Like poetry does?" Dulcie hazarded.
"Just like poetry. And one thing more. Don't speak to Mr. Vavasour
unless he speaks to you."
"No, no, Aunt Anne. I never do."
Once again I must compress. As the summer advanced, Gertrude, nose down
in full cry on the track, unfolded to me a project which only needed my
co-operation.
I reminded her that I never co-operated, but she paid no attention, and
said she wished to send the children with Joan and Dulcie to the seaside
for a month, while she watched over Jimmy during his annual visit to
Harrogate. The children required a change.
I agreed.
She had thought of Lee on the Solent. (You will remember, reader, that
Mr. Vavasour's place was near Lee.)
"Why Lee?" I said, pretending surprise. "Expensive and only ten miles
away. No real change of climate. Send them to Felixstowe or
Scarborough."
But Gertrude's mind was made up. She poured forth batches of adequate
reasons. It must be Lee. Would I accompany the party as their guest?
Joan and Dulcie were rather too young to go into lodgings alone.
I saw at once that, under the circumstances, Lee was no place for me. I
might get into hot water. I, so free now, might become entangled in the
affairs of others, and might be blamed later on. I might find myself
acting with duplicity or, to be more exact, I might be found out to be
doing so.
I declined with regretful gratitude. If it had been Felixstowe or
Scarborough I would have taken charge with pleasure, but I always had
rheumatism at Lee. Rheumatism was a very capricious ailment.
"It is, indeed," said Gertrude coldly.
"Send your old governess," I suggested, "the ancient Miss Jones who
lives at Banff. You have her here every summer for a month. Kill two
birds with one stone. Let her have her annual outing at Lee instead of
here."
Gertrude was undeniably struck by my suggestion, though she found fault
with it. As she began to come round to it I then raised objections to
it. I reminded her that Miss Jones was as blind as a bat: that when she
accompanied them to Scotland the year before she had mistaken the
footman bathing for a salmon leaping. But Gertrude was of the opinion
that Miss Jones's shortsightedness was no real drawback.
The expedition started, and I actually produced five pounds for Dulcie
to spend on seaside attire. I considered it a good investment.
Before Gertrude departed with Jimmy for Harrogate she volunteered with a
meaning smile that she understood Mr. Wilson bicycled over frequently to
Lee.
"Ten miles is nothing," I said, "to a high principled poultry fancier."
"Now you know," she said archly, "why I did not wish to remove Dulcie to
a great distance at this critical moment in her young life. I hear from
Miss Jones, who writes daily, that there are shrimping expeditions and
picnics with the children, strolls by moonlight without them."
Reader, I did not oblige that serpent to disgorge the fact that
moonlight strolls are not taken by two women and one man. I knew as well
as possible that Miss Jones had received a hint to give these two young
men every opportunity. I thanked Providence that I had not got into that
_galère_. I had been saved by the fixed principle of a life time to
avoid action of any kind.
I had hardly begun to enjoy the month of solitude when it was over, and
Gertrude and Jimmy returned from Harrogate, he very limp and depressed,
as always after his cure, and sure that it had done him more harm than
good.
The two girls came back from the Solent looking the picture of health;
even Joan was almost pretty, beaming under her tan. Dulcibella, who did
not tan, was ravishing. The children were a rich brown pink apparently
all over, and the ancient Miss Jones was a jet-beaded mass of bridling
gratitude and self-importance.
Then, of course, the storm burst.
You and I, reader, know exactly what had happened. Dulcie had got
engaged to Mr. Vavasour, and Joan to Mr. Wilson.
Dulcie came skimming down in the dusk the first evening to announce the
event to me, her soft cheek pressed to mine. She said she wanted me to
be the first to know.
_And Gertrude had said I could do nothing for her!_
She told me that at that very moment the blissful Joan was announcing
her own betrothal to her parents.
Next morning Jimmy came down to see me. He generally gravitated to me if
anything went wrong.
"We are in a hat up at the house," he said. "Joan has actually engaged
herself to that oaf, Wilson. Infernal cheek on his part, I call it."
"You have had him hanging about for months," I said, "I expect he and
Joan thought you approved."
"They did. They do. But that doesn't make it any better. Of course I
said I would not allow it, and Joan was amazed and cried all night, and
Gertrude is in a state of such nervous tension you can't go near her,
and poor old Jones, who came back preening herself, is bathed in
tears--and Gertrude says I have got to speak to Wilson at once. She
always says things have got to be done at once."
He groaned, and sat down heavily on my low wall, crushing a branch of
verbena.
"It's not as if I hadn't warned Gertrude," he went on. "I said to her
several times 'I'm always catching my foot against Wilson,' and yet she
would have him about the place. She as good as told me she thought he
and Dulcie might make a match of it. But it's my opinion Dulcie never so
much as looked at him. I told Gertrude so, but she only smiled, and said
I was to leave it to her, and that it was in those confounded stars that
Dulcie would marry almost at once. This is what her beastly stars have
brought us to."
"She did tell me there was an early marriage for Joan, too, in her
horoscope," I hazarded.
"Well, we had had thoughts, I mean Gertrude had, that young Vavasour
came over oftener than he need. He's rather a bent lily, but of course
he's an uncommonly good match. I should not have thought there was
anything in it, myself, but Gertrude kept rubbing it in. That is why
they went to Lee."
"You don't say so!"
"Yes, I do say so. But look how it has turned out."
"I think I ought to tell you--I'm so astonished that even now I don't
know how to believe it--I only heard of it last night,--that Dulcie has
accepted Mr. Vavasour."
For a moment Jimmy stared at me, and then he burst into shouts of
laughter.
"Well done, Anne!" he said, rolling on my poor verbena. "Well done,
Dulcie. That little slyboots. Thirty thousand a year. What a score. Who
would have thought it, Anne! You look so remote and unworldly in your
grey hair, stitching away at your woolwork picture. But you've outwitted
Gertrude. Well, I don't care what she says. I'm glad of any luck
happening to Dulcie. She is not fit to struggle for herself in this hard
world. But Gertrude will never forgive _you_, Anne. You may make up your
mind to that."
"But what have I done?" I bleated. "Nothing. I'm as innocent as an
unlaid egg."
"You may be, but she will never forgive you all the same," said Jimmy
slowly rising, and brushing traces of verbena from his person. "Stupid
people never forgive, and they always avenge themselves by brute force."
Old Miss Jones, bewildered and tearful, toddled down to see me, boring
me to death with plans for leaving Banff and settling in Bournemouth
with a married niece. Joan rushed down, boisterously happy, and
confident that her father would give in; Jimmy, weakening daily, came
down. Mr. Wilson called, modest and hopeful; Dulcie, and the children
came down, Mr. Vavasour, a stooping youth, with starling eyes, and an
intense manner, motored over.
_But Gertrude never came._
I consoled myself with Mr. Vavasour. There was no doubt he was in love
with Dulcie, and I surmised that in the future, if she could not
dominate him, his aunt by marriage might be able to do so. I can't say
whether Dulcie cared much about him, but I told her firmly that she was
very much in love, and she said, "Yes, yes, Aunt Anne."
That was what was so endearing about Dulcie.
She was so obliging; always ready to run upstairs for my spectacles, or
to marry anybody.
One evening, when she was dining with me, she proceeded to draw out her
Ronald's horoscope.
She was evidently extraordinarily well up in the subject.
"I will ask, Mrs. Cross," she said at last, after much knitting of white
brows, "but I should say Ronald was certainly not going to marry at all
at this moment with Mercury and Jupiter in opposition. But then I said
the same about myself, and about your going on a long journey. I should
have thought some great change was inevitable with your sun now
sesquiquadrate to Uranus in Cancer. But Mrs. Cross said I was absolutely
mistaken about both. She was very emphatic."
"You don't mean to say you believe a single word of it," I said, amazed.
"Oh, yes, Aunt Anne, of course I do. Why, don't you remember you
yourself advised me to study it. I'm _sure_ it's all true, only it's
difficult to disentangle."
Jimmy came down next day, and a more crestfallen man I have never seen.
I was dividing my white pinks, and he collapsed on a bench, and looked
at me.
"You've given in about Mr. Wilson," I said drily.
"I have. Gertrude came round to it quite suddenly last night."
"Bear up," I said "They will probably be very happy."
"I don't find I mind much now it's decided on. And between ourselves
Gertrude and Joan did not hit it off too well. I used to get a bit
rattled between the two of them. It will be more peaceful when Joan is
married."
"Then I don't see why you look so woe-begone."
Jimmy shifted on his bench.
"Anne," he said solemnly, "you made the great mistake of your life when
you refused me."
"You could not expect me to leave a brand new kitchen boiler for you. I
told you that at the time."
"We should have suited each other," went on Jimmy, drearily, ignoring
manlike, my reasons for celibacy. "We are both," he paused and then
added with dignity, "contemplatives by nature. We should have sat down
in two armchairs for life. I should never have been a magistrate, and a
chairman of a cursed Parish Council. I should just have been happy."
"I _have_ been happy," I said, "I _am_ happy."
"You have had a beautiful life: one long siesta. That is so like you.
_You_ have fetched it off and I've missed it. Just as Gertrude has
missed this match for Joan, and you have fetched it off for Dulcie. If I
had married you you would never have wanted me to exert myself. That was
why my higher nature turned to you like a sunflower to the sun. You
ought to have taken me. After all, you are the only woman I have ever
proposed to," said the twice married man.
"I thought as much," I said, pulling my white pinks apart.
"You might have known," he said darkly, and a glint of malice
momentarily shone in his kindly eyes, "that trouble would some day
overtake you for your wicked selfishness in refusing me."
I did not notice what he was saying so much as that alien expression in
my old friend's face. I stared at him.
"I'm putty in Gertrude's hands," he continued solemnly, "as I should
have been in yours. It's no kind of use saying I ought not to be putty.
I know I ought not, but putty I am. You don't know what marriage is
like. No peace unless you give in entirely--no terms--no half-way house,
no nothing except unconditional surrender."
I had never heard Jimmy speak like this before. I put in a layer of
pinks, and then looked at him again.
There were tears in his eyes.
"My dear old soul," he burst out, "I can't help it, I _cannot_ help it.
She insisted on my coming down and telling you myself. She said it must
come from me, as my own idea, and I'm not to mention her at all. The
truth is--she has decided--and nothing will move her--that it will be
best if Joan and Bobby Wilson lived quite near us for a time as they are
both so young--in fact--" his voice became hoarse--"in this cottage."
"_My_ cottage!" I said. "_Here!_"
He nodded.
For a moment I could neither see nor hear. My brain reeled. I clutched
at something which turned out to be Jimmy's hand.
"My own little house," I gasped. "My garden, made with my own hands. The
only place my rheumatism--" I choked.
"Don't take on so, Anne," but it was Jimmy who was crying, not I, "I'll
find something else for you. Miss Jones is leaving Banff. You shall have
her house rent free. I hate it all just as much as you. It makes me
sick to think of chicken hutches on your lawn; but, but--you _shouldn't_
have outwitted Gertrude."
"She told me there was no movement, no journey of any kind in my
horoscope," I groaned.
"She says she made a mistake, and that she sees now there is a long
journey. Dulcie told her so some time ago, but she would not hear of it.
But now she has worked it out again, and she says Dulcie was right after
all. You are plum in the thick of Uranian upheavals."
"And is Dulcie's marriage a mistake, too?"
"She said nothing about that. But, between ourselves, Anne, though I'm
not an astrologer, I should not count on it too much, for I've been
making a few enquiries about Vavasour, and I find he has been engaged
four times already. It's a sort of habit with him to get engaged, and
his mother never opposes him, but she has a sort of habit of gently
getting him out of it--every time."
* * * * *
All this took place several years ago. I live in the suburbs of Banff
now in Miss Jones's old house. As there is no garden that kind Jimmy has
built me a little conservatory sticking like a blister to the unattached
wall of my semi-detached villa. He sends me a hamper of vegetables every
week, and Joan presents me with a couple of chickens now and then,
_reared on my lawn_.
They come in handy when Dulcie and her Wilhelm are staying with me. Herr
Müller has an appointment in Aberdeen now. They are dreadfully poor, and
a little Müller arrives every year, but Dulcie is as happy as she is
incompetent and impecunious. She adds to their small muddled away income
by giving lessons in astrology. I have learned the rudiments of the
science, in order when I stay with her to help her with her pupils. But
I never stay long as I have rheumatism as severely in Aberdeen as in
Banff.
Her Murderer
"The truth is, I shall have to murder her!" said Mark gloomily. "I see
no way out of it."
"I could not be really happy with a husband whose hands were red with
gore," I remarked. "I'm super-sensitive, I know. I can't help it. I was
made so. If you murder her, I warn you I shall throw you over. And where
would you be then?"
"Exactly where I am now, as far as marrying you is concerned. You may
throw me over as much as you like. I shan't turn a hair."
He had not many hairs left to turn, and perhaps he remembered that fact,
and that I held nothing sacred, for he hurried on in an aggrieved tone:
"You never give me credit for any imagination. I'm not going to spill
her blood. I'm much too tidy. I've thought it all out. I shall take you
and her on a picnic to the New Forest, and trot you both about till
you're nearly famished. And then for luncheon I shall produce a tin of
potted lobster. I shall choose it very carefully with a bulging tin.
Potted lobster is deadly when the tin bulges. And as the luncheon will
be at my expense, she will eat more than usual. She will 'partake
heartily,' as the newspapers will say afterwards; at least, as I hope
they will have occasion to say. And then directly the meal is over the
lobster will begin to do its duty, and swell inside her, and she'll
begin struggling among the picnic things. I shan't be there. I shall
have gone for a little stroll. You will support her in her last moments.
I don't mind helping with the funeral. I'd do that willingly."
I laughed, but I was near to tears.
"How long have we been engaged?" asked Mark.
"Twelve years. You know that as well as I do."
"Well, as far as I can see, we shall be still affianced in twenty years'
time. Aunt Pussy will see us all out."
"We may toddle to the altar yet," I said hysterically, "when you are
about eighty and I am seventy. And I shall give you a bath-chair, and
you will present the bridesmaids, who must not be a day younger than
myself, with rubber hot-water bottles. Rubber will be cheap again by
then."
He came back, and sat down by me.
"It's damnable!" he said.
"It is," I replied.
"And it isn't as if the little ass couldn't afford it!" he broke out,
after a moment. "She can't have less than thirty thousand a year, and
she lives on one. And it will all come to you when she dies. And it's
rolling up, and rolling up, and the years pass and pass. Our case is
desperate. Janet, can't you say something to her? Can't you make a great
appeal to her? Can't you get hold of someone who has an influence over
her, and appeal to them?"
I did not think it necessary to answer. He knew I had tried everything
years ago.
It had been thought a wonderful thing for me when Aunt Pussy, my
godmother, adopted me when I was fourteen. We were a large family, and I
was the only delicate one, not fitted, so my parents thought, to "fend
for myself" in this rough world. And I had always liked Aunt Pussy, and
she me. And she promised my father, on his impecunious death-bed, that
she would take charge of me and educate me. She further gratuitously and
solemnly promised that she would leave me all her money. Her all was not
much, a few hundreds a year. But that was a great deal to people like
ourselves. She was our one rich relation, and it was felt that I was
provided for, which eventually caused an estrangement between me and my
brothers and sisters, who had to work for their living; while I always
had pretty clothes and a little--a very little--pocket-money, and did
nothing in the way of work except arrange flowers, and write a few
notes, and comb out Aunt Pussy's Flossy, being careful to keep the
parting even down the middle of his back.
My sisters became workers, and they also became ardent Suffragists,
which would have shocked my father dreadfully if he had been alive, for
he was of opinion that woman's proper sphere is the home, though, of
course, if you have not got a home or any money it seems rather
difficult for women to remain in their sphere.
I, being provided for, remained perfectly womanly, of the type that the
Anti-Suffrage League, and the sterner sex especially, admire. I took
care of my appearance, I dressed charmingly on the very small allowance
which Aunt Pussy doled out to me, I was an adept at all the little
details which make a home pleasant, I never wanted to do anything except
to marry Mark.
For across the even tenor of our lives, in a little villa in Kensington,
as even as the parting down Flossie's back, presently came two great
events. Aunt Pussy inherited an enormous fortune, and the following
year, I being then twenty, fell in love with Mark and accepted him. I
can't tell you whether he, poor dear, was quite disinterested at first.
It was, of course, known that I should inherit all my aunt's money. He
was rather above me in the social scale. I have sometimes thought that
his old painted, gambling Jezebel of a mother prodded him in my
direction.
But if he was not disinterested at first, he became so. We were two
perfectly ordinary young people. But we were meant for each other, and
we both knew it.
We never for a moment thought there would be any real difficulty in the
way of our marriage. Aunt Pussy was, of course, exasperatingly
niggardly, but she was now very wealthy, and she approved of Mark,
partly because he was not without means. He was an only child with a
little of his own, and with expectations from his mother. He had had a
sunstroke in Uganda, which had forced him to give up his profession, but
he was independent of it. Aunt Pussy, however, though she was most kind
and sentimental about us, could not at first be induced to say anything
definite about money.
When, after a few months, I began to grow pale and thin, she went so far
as to say that she would give me an allowance equal to his income. I
fancy even that concession cost her nights of agony. If he could make up
five hundred a year she would make up the same.
Was this the moment, I ask you, for his wicked old mother to gamble
herself into disgrace and bankruptcy? My poor Mark came, swearing
horribly, to her assistance. But when he had done so, and had given her
a pittance to live on, there was nothing left for himself.
Even then neither of us thought it mattered much. Aunt Pussy would
surely come round. But we had not reckoned on the effect that a large
fortune can make on a miserly temperament. She clutched at the fact that
Mark was penniless as a reason to withdraw her previous promise. She
would not part with a penny. She did not want to part with me. She put
us off with one pretext after another. After several years of irritation
and anger and exasperation, we discovered what we ought to have known
from the first, that nothing would induce her to give up anything in her
life-time, though she was much too religious to break her promise to my
father. She intended to leave me everything. But she was not going to
part with sixpence as long as she could hold on to it.
We tried to move her, but she was not to be moved. On looking back I see
now that she was more eccentric than we realised at the time. In the
course of twelve years Mark and I went through all the vicissitudes that
two commonplace people deeply in love do go through if they can't marry.
We became desperate. We decided to part. We urged each other to marry
someone else. We conjured each other to feel perfectly free. We doubted
each other. He swore. I wept. He tried to leave me and he couldn't. I
did not try. I knew it was no use. We each had opportunities of marrying
advantageously if we could only have disentangled ourselves from each
other. I learned what jealousy can be of a woman, younger and better
looking, and sweeter-tempered and with thicker hair than myself.
He asseverated with fury that he was never jealous of me. If that was
so, his outrageous behaviour to his own cousin, a rich and blameless
widower in search of a wife, was inexplicable. And now, after twelve
years, we had reached a point where we could only laugh. There was
nothing else to be done. He was growing stout, and I was growing lean.
If only middle-aged men could grow thin, and poor middle-aged women a
little plump, life would be easier for them. But we reversed it. Aunt
Pussy alone seemed untouched by time. Even Mark's optimistic eye could
never detect any sign of "breaking up" about her.
And throughout those dreary years we had one supreme consolation, and a
very painful consolation it was. We loved each other.
"It's damnable!" said Mark again. "Well, if I'm not to murder her, if
you're going to thwart me in every little wish just as if we were
married already, I don't see what there is to be done. I've inquired
about a post obit."
"Oh, Mark!"
"It's no use saying 'Oh, Mark'! I tell you I've inquired about a post
obit, and if you had a grain of affection for me you would have done the
same yourself years ago. But it seems you can't raise money on a promise
which may be broken. As I said before, there is no way out of it except
by bloodshed. I shall have to murder her, and then you can marry me or
not as you like. You will like, safe enough, if I am handy with the
remains."
The door opened, and Aunt Pussy hurried in. She was always in a hurry.
We did not start away from each other, but remained stolidly seated side
by side on the horsehair dining-room sofa with anger in our hearts
against her. She had never given me a sitting-room. I always had to
interview Mark in the dining-room with a plate of oranges on the
sideboard, like a heroine in "The Quiver."
Aunt Pussy was a small, dried-up woman of between fifty and sixty, with
a furtive eye and a perpetually moving mouth, who looked as if she had
been pinched out of shape by someone with a false sense of humour and no
reverence. She was dressed in every shade of old black--rusty black,
green black, brown black, spotted black, figured black, plain black.
Mark got up slowly, and held out his hand.
"How do you do, Mark?" she said nervously. "I will own I'm somewhat
surprised to see you here," ignoring his hand, and taking some figs out
of a string bag, and placing them on an empty plate (the one that ought
to have had oranges in it) on the sideboard. "I have brought you some
figs, Janet; you said you liked them. I thought it was agreed that until
Mark had some reasonable prospect of being able to support a wife his
visits here had better cease."
"I never agreed," said Mark, "I was always for their continuing. I've
been against a long engagement from the first."
"Well, in any case, you must have a cup of tea now you are here,"
continued Aunt Pussy, taking off her worn gloves, which I had mended for
her till the fingers were mere stumps. "Ring the bell, Janet. We will
have tea in here as there isn't a fire in the drawing-room."
She put down more parcels on the table, and then her face changed.
"My bag!" she gasped, and collapsed into a chair like one felled by
emotion. "My bag!"
We looked everywhere. Mark explored the hall and the umbrella-stand. No
handbag was to be seen.
"I knew something would happen if the month began with a Friday!" moaned
Aunt Pussy.
"Had it a great deal in it?" I asked.
"Twenty pounds!" said Aunt Pussy, as if it were the savings of a
lifetime. "I had drawn twenty pounds to pay the monthly books." And she
became the colour of lead.
I flew for her salts, and made tea quickly, and presently she recovered
sufficiently to drink it. But her hand shook.
"Twenty pounds!" she repeated, below her breath.
We questioned her as to where she last remembered using the bag, and at
length elicited the information that she had no recollection of its
society after visiting Brown and Prodgers, the great shop in Baskaville
Road, where she recalled eating a meat lozenge, drawn from its recesses.
Mark offered to go round there at once, and see if it had been found.
"I've never lost anything before," she said when he had gone, "but I
felt this morning that some misfortune was going to happen. There was a
black cat on the leads when I looked out. As sure as fate, if I see a
black cat something goes wrong. Last time I saw one, two of my
handkerchiefs were missing from the wash."
As Aunt Pussy bought her handkerchiefs in the sales for less than
sixpence each, I felt that the black cat made himself rather cheap.
Mark returned with the cheering news that a bag had been found at Brown
and Prodgers, and one of the principal shopwalkers had taken charge of
it. And if Aunt Pussy would call in person to-morrow, and accurately
describe its contents, it would be returned to her.
Aunt Pussy was so much relieved that she actually smiled on him, and
offered him a second cup of tea. But next morning at breakfast I saw at
once that something was gravely amiss.
Had she slept?
Yes.
Had she seen the black cat?
No.
"The truth is, Janet," she said, "I have had a most terrible dream. I
feel sure it was a warning, and I really don't know whether I ought to
call for it or not."
"Call for what?"
"The bag."
"Was the dream about the bag?"
"What else could it be about? I took one of my little bromides last
night, for I knew I had not a chance of sleep after the agitation of the
day. And I fell asleep at once. And I dreamed that it was morning, and I
was in my outdoor things going to Brown and Prodgers for the bag. And
the black cat walked all the way before me with its tail up. But it did
not come in. And when I got there I told a shopwalker who was standing
near the door what I had come about. He was a tall, dark man with a sort
of down look. He bowed and said, 'Follow me, madam.' And I followed him.
And we went through the--ahem! the gentlemen's underclothing, which I
make a point of never going through, I always go round by the artificial
flowers, until we came to a glass door near the lift. And he unlocked
the door and I went in, and there on the table lay my bag. I was so
delighted I ran to take it. But he stopped me, and I saw then what an
evil-looking man he was. And he said, 'Look well at this bag, madam. Do
you recognise it as yours?' And I looked and I said I did. There was the
place where you had mended the handle.
"Then he took it up, and put it in my hand, and said, 'Look well at the
contents, madam, and verify that they are all there.'
"So I looked at them, and they were all there, the tradesmen's books and
everything. And I counted the money and it came right. The only thing I
could not be sure about was the number of the meat lozenges. I thought
one might have been stolen.
"Then when I had finished he said, 'Look well at me, madam, for I am
your murderer.' And I was so terrified that I dropped the bag and woke
with a scream. Now, Janet, don't you think it would be flying in the
face of Providence to go there this morning? Dreams like that are not
sent for nothing."
"Well, perhaps it would be better not," I said maliciously, for I knew
very well that Aunt Pussy would risk any form of death rather than lose
twenty pounds.
"I thought perhaps you would not mind getting it for me. The danger
would not be the same for you."
"I should not mind in the least, but they will only give it up to you."
Aunt Pussy's superstition struggled with her miserliness throughout her
frugal breakfast. Need I say her miserliness won. Had it ever sustained
one defeat in all her life! But she remained agitated and nervous to an
extreme degree. I offered to go with her, but she felt that was not
protection enough. So I telephoned to Mark, and presently he arrived and
Aunt Pussy solemnly recapitulated her dream, and we all three set out
together, she walking a little ahead, evidently on the look-out for the
black cat.
Mark whispered to me that the portent about the black cat was being
verified for us, not her, and that the shopwalker was evidently a very
decent fellow, and that if he did his duty by us he should certainly ask
him to be best man at our wedding. He had not made up his mind how deep
his mourning ought to be for a murdered aunt-in-law, and was, to use his
own expression, still poised like a humming-bird between a grey silk tie
and a black one with a white spot, when we reached the shop.
It was early, and there were very few customers about. A tall dark man
was walking up and down. Aunt Pussy instantly clutched my arm, and
whispered, "It's him!"
He saw us looking at him, and came up to us, a melancholy downcast,
unprepossessing-looking man. As Aunt Pussy could only stare at him,
Mark, who had spoken to him the day before, told him the lady had come
to identify the bag lost on the previous afternoon. The man bowed to
Aunt Pussy, and said, "Follow me, madam," and we followed him through
several departments.
"Gentlemen's outfitting!" hissed Aunt Pussy suddenly in my ear, pointing
with a trembling finger at a line of striped and tasselled pyjamas which
she had avoided for many years.
Presently we came to a glass door, and the man took a key from his
pocket, opened the door, and ushered us in. And there on a small table
lay a bag--_the_ bag--Aunt Pussy's bag, with the mended handle. She
groaned.
The man fixed his eyes on her and said:
"Look well at this bag, madam. Do you recognise it as yours?"
"I do," said Aunt Pussy, as inaudibly as a bride at the altar.
He then asked her what the contents were, and she described them
categorically. He then took up the bag, put it into her hand, and said,
"Look well at the contents, madam, and verify that they are all there."
They were all there. As Aunt Pussy was too paralysed to utter another
word I said so for her.
There was a long pause. The man looked searchingly from one to the other
of us, and sighed. If he expected a tip he was disappointed. After a
moment he moved towards Aunt Pussy to open the door behind her. As he
did so she gave a faint scream, and subsided on the floor in a swoon.
When we had resuscitated and conveyed her home, and Mark had gone, she
said in a hollow voice:
"Wasn't it enough to make anybody faint?"
I said cheerfully that I did not see any cause for alarm; that the man
no doubt always used exactly the same formula whenever lost property had
to be identified.
"But why should he have said just at the last moment, 'Look well at me,
madam, I am your murderer?'"
"Dear Aunt Pussy, of course he never said any such thing!"
"He did! I heard him! That was why I fainted."
It was in vain I assured her that she was mistaken. She only became
hysterical and said I was deceiving her; that she saw I had heard it,
too. She had been eccentric before, but from this time onwards she
became even more so. She would not deal at Brown and Prodgers any more.
She would not even pass the shop. She became more penurious than ever.
We could hardly persuade servants to stay with us so rigid was she about
the dripping. It was all I could do to obtain the necessary money for
our economical housekeeping. As the lease of our house was drawing to a
close, she decided to move into a flat, thinking it might be cheaper.
But when it was all arranged and the lease signed, she refused to go in,
because the man who met us there with a selection of wallpapers was, she
averred, the same man whom she always spoke of as her murderer.
And I believe she was right. I thought I recognised him myself. I asked
him if he had not formerly been at Brown and Prodgers, and he replied
that he had; but was now employed by Whisk and Blake. After this
encounter nothing would induce Aunt Pussy to enter her new home. She had
to pay heavily for her changeableness, but she only wrung her hands and
paid up. The poor little woman had a hunted look. She evidently thought
she had had a great escape.
Mark, who did not grow more rational with increasing years, said that
this was obviously the psychological moment for us to marry, and drew a
vivid picture of the group at the altar--the blushing bridegroom and
determined bride, and how when Aunt Pussy saw her murderer step forward
as the best man, with a gardenia in his buttonhole, she would die of
shock on the spot. And after handsomely remunerating our benefactor, he
and I should whisk away in a superb motor, with a gross of shilling
cigars on an expensive honeymoon.
Six months passed, and there was no talk of any honeymoons. And then the
lease of our house came to an end, and Aunt Pussy, having refused to
allow any other house or flat to be taken, she was forced to warehouse
her furniture, and we had recourse to the miseries of hotel life.
Needless to say, we did not go to a quiet residential hotel, but to one
of those monster buildings glued on to a railway station, where the
inmates come and go every day.
Strangely enough, the galvanised activity of hotel existence pleased
Aunt Pussy. She called it "seeing life." She even made timid advances to
other old ladies, knitting and dozing in the airless seclusion of the
ladies' drawing-room, for, of course, we had no sitting-room. I saw
plainly enough that we should live in those two small adjoining bedrooms
under the roof, looking into a tiled air-shaft, for the remainder of
Aunt Pussy's life.
Three months we lived there, and then at the cheapest time in the year,
when the hotel was half empty and the heat of our rooms appalling, she
consented to move for a short time into the two rooms exactly below
ours, which looked on the comparatively balmy open of the August
thoroughfare, and had a balcony.
I had realised by this time that Aunt Pussy was no longer responsible
for her long cruelty to Mark and me, and my old affection for her
revived somewhat with her pathetic dependence on me. She could hardly
bear me out of her sight.
A certain Mrs. Curtis, a benevolent old Australian widow, living in
rooms next ours on this lower floor, showed us great kindness. She
grasped at once what Aunt Pussy was, and she would sit with her by the
hour, enabling me to go out in the air. She took me for drives. She soon
discovered there was a Mark in the background, and often asked us to
dine at her table, and invited him too.
She was said to be enormously wealthy, and she certainly wore a few
wonderful jewels, but she was always shabbily dressed. Aunt Pussy became
very fond of her, and must have been a great trial to her, running in
and out of her rooms at all hours. She gave us tea in her sitting-room
next door to us, and this gave Aunt Pussy special satisfaction, as we,
having no sitting-room, could not possibly, as she constantly averred,
return the civility.
Towards the end of September the hotel began to fill again, and the
prices of the lower rooms were raised. So we moved back to our old
quarters, and Mrs. Curtis, who had a noisy bedroom, took for herself and
her son the two we had vacated. Her son was expected, and I have never
forgotten her face of joy when she received a telegram from him during
dinner saying he had reached Calais, and should arrive next morning.
We were dining early, for the kind old woman was taking Mark and me to
the play. The play was delightful, and he and I, sitting together
laughing at it, forgot our troubles, forgot that our youth was
irretrievably gone, and that we were no nearer happiness than we had
been thirteen years before. Our little friend in her weird black gown,
with her thin fingers covered with large diamonds clutching an opera
glass, looked at us with pained benevolence.
Mark saw us back to the door of our hotel, and after he was gone Mrs.
Curtis took my arm as we mounted the steps and said gently:
"You and that nice absurd man must keep your courage up. I waited
seventeen years for my husband, and when it was over it was only like a
day."
The night porter appeared at the lift door, and we got in. He stood with
his back to me, and I did not look at him till he said: "What floor?"
The servants knew us so well that I was surprised at the question,
and glanced at him. It was Aunt Pussy's murderer. I recognised
him instantly, and I will own my first thought was one of
self-congratulation.
"Now we shall leave this horrible place," I thought. "She will never
stay another day if he is here."
But my second thought was for her. She might go clean out of her mind if
she were suddenly confronted with him. What would it be best to do?
When he had put down Mrs. Curtis at Floor 7, and we were rumbling
towards Floor 8, he volunteered, as we bumped with violence against the
roof that he was new to the work. I asked him what hours he came on and
went off at. He said, "Heleven p.hem. to hate hay-hem." He did not
recognise me--as, indeed, why should he?--but he looked more downcast
and villainous than ever. It was evident that life had not gone well
with him since he had been foreman at Brown and Prodgers.
"Lady's son from Horsetralia just arrived," he remarked
conversationally, jerking his thumb towards the lower landing. "Took 'im
up 'arf an hour ago."
I was surprised that Mr. Curtis should have already arrived, but in
another moment I forgot all about it, for the first object that met my
eyes as I opened my door was Aunt Pussy in a state of great agitation,
sitting fully dressed on my bed. It seemed that after we had started for
the play she had stood a moment in the hall looking after us, and she
had seen her murderer pass, and not only had he passed, but he had
exchanged a few words with the hall porter airing himself on the hotel
steps.
"We must leave. We must leave to-morrow, Janet," she repeated, in an
agony of terror. "I know he'll get in and kill me. That's why he spoke
to the porter. Let's go and live at Margate. No, not Margate; it's too
public. But I saw a little house at Southwold once; tumbling down it
was, with no road up to it. Such a horrid place! We might go and live
_there_. No one would ever think I should go there. Promise me you will
take me away from London to-morrow, Janet."
I promised, I realised that we must go at once, and I calculated that if
Aunt Pussy, who always breakfasted in her room, only left it at ten
o'clock to enter a cab to take her to the station it was impossible she
should run across the new night porter, who went off duty several hours
earlier. She must never know that he was actually in the house.
I tried to calm her, but dawn was already in the sky, or rather
reflected on the tiles of our air-shaft, before she fell asleep, and I
could go to my room and try to do the same.
I did it so effectually that it was nearly ten o'clock before I went
down to breakfast, leaving Aunt Pussy still slumbering.
While I drank my coffee I looked out the trains for Southwold, and noted
down the name of a quiet hotel there, and then went to the manager's
office to give up our rooms. When I got there a tired, angry young man,
with a little bag, was interviewing the manager, who was eyeing him
doubtfully, while a few paces away the hall porter, all gold braid and
hair-oil and turned-out feet, was watching the scene.
"Surely Mrs. Curtis told you she was expecting me, her son," he was
saying as I came up.
"Yes, sir," said the manager, civil but suspicious. "No doubt, sir. Mrs.
Curtis said as you were expected this morning, but, begging your pardon,
you arrived last night, sir. Mr. Gregory Curtis arrived last night just
after I retired for the evening."
"Impossible," said the young man, impatiently. "There is some mistake.
Take me to Mrs. Curtis's room at once."
The manager hesitated.
"This certainly is Mr. Gregory Curtis," I said, coming forward. "He is
exactly like the photograph of her son which stands on Mrs. Curtis's
table, and which I have seen scores of times."
The young man looked gratefully at me. And then, in a flash, as it were,
we all took alarm.
"Then who _did_ you take up to my mother's rooms last night?" said her
son. "And who took him up?"
"Not me, sir," said the hall porter promptly. "I was off duty. Clarke,
the new night porter, must have took him up."
"Where _is_ Clarke?" asked the manager, seizing down a key from a peg on
the wall.
"Gone to bed, sir. Not been gone five minutes."
"Bring him to me at once. And take this gentleman and me up in the lift
first."
"This lady also," said Gregory, indicating me.
A horrible sense of guilt was stealing over me. Why hadn't I waited to
see the fragile little old woman safely into her rooms?
The manager and Gregory did not speak. I dared not look at them. The
lift came to a standstill, and in a moment the manager was out of it,
and fitting his master key into the lock of No. 10, almost knocking over
a can of hot water on the mat. The door opened, and we all went in.
The room was dark, and as the manager went hastily forward to draw the
curtain his foot struck against something and he drew back with an
exclamation. I, who was nearest the door, turned on the electric light.
Mrs. Curtis was lying with outstretched arms on her face on the floor.
Her widow's cap had fallen off, revealing on the crown of the head a
dark stain. Her small hands, waxen white, were spread out as if in mild
deprecation. There were no rings on them. The despatch box on the
dressing table had been broken open, and the jewel cases lay scattered
on the floor.
After a moment of stupor, Gregory and I raised the little figure and
laid it on the bed. It was obvious that there was nothing to be done.
As we did so the door opened and the day porter dragged in the new lift
man, holding him strongly by the arm.
They both looked at the dead woman on the bed. And then the lift man
began to shake as with an ague, and his face became as ashen as hers.
"You saw her last alive," said the manager, "and you took up the party
to her room last night."
The lift man was speechless. The drops stood on his forehead. He looked
the image of guilt.
And as we stood staring at him Aunt Pussy ambled in in her
dressing-gown, with her comb in her hand, having probably left something
in the room she had only yesterday vacated.
Her eyes fell first on the dead body, and then on the lift man.
I expected her to scream or faint, but she did neither. She seemed
frozen. Then she raised a steady comb and pointed it at the lift man.
"He is her murderer," she said solemnly. "He meant to murder me. He told
me so a year ago. He has followed me here to do it. But he did not know
I had changed my rooms, and he has killed her instead."
I don't know what happened after that, for I was entirely taken up with
Aunt Pussy. I put my hand over her mouth, and hustled her back to her
rooms.
"He will be hanged now," she said over and over again throughout that
awful day. "He is _certain_ to be hanged, and when he is really dead I
shall feel safe. Then I shall take a house, and you shall have a motor,
and anything you like, Janet. He's in prison now, isn't he?"
"Yes, poor creature. He is under arrest. A policeman has taken him
away."
"Safe in prison now, and hanged very soon. I shan't be easy otherwise.
And then I shall sleep peacefully in my bed."
She was better than she had been for the last year. She ate and slept,
and seemed to have taken a new lease of life. She was absolutely callous
about Mrs. Curtis's death, and suggested that half-a-guinea was quite
enough to give for a wreath.
"If you're thinking of the number of times she gave us tea," she said,
"it could not possibly, with tea as cheap as it is now--Harrod's own
only one and seven--come to more than eight and six." And she opened her
"Daily Mail" and pored over it. She had of late ceased to take in any
paper, but now she took in the "Daily Mail" and the "Evening Standard,"
and read the police news with avidity, looking for the trial of "her
murderer."
Mark and I went to the funeral, and he was very low all the way home. He
was really distressed about Mrs. Curtis and Gregory, but of course he
would not allow it, and accounted for his depression by saying that he
had been attending the _wrong_ funeral. He said he did not actually
blame Clarke (the lift man), for he had shown good intentions, but the
man was evidently a procrastinator and a bungler, who had deceived the
confidence he (Mark) had reposed in him, and on whom no one could place
reliance. Such men, he averred, were better hanged and out of the way.
When I got back to our rooms I found Aunt Pussy leaning back in her
armchair near the window, with the "Evening Standard" spread out on her
knee. A large heading caught my eye:
"SENSATIONAL ARREST OF THE
MURDERER OF MRS. CURTIS."
"RELEASE OF CLARKE."
It had caught Aunt Pussy's eye too. And her sheer terror had been too
much for her. She would never be frightened any more. She had had her
last shock. She was dead.
* * * * *
A month later Mark came to see me in the evening. We did not seem to
have much to say to each other, perhaps because we were to be married
next day. But I presently discovered that he was suffering from a
suppressed communication.
"Out with it," I said. "You've got a wife and five small children at
Peckham. There is still time to counter-order the motor and the wedding
and the shilling cigars and--me."
He took no notice.
"I've seen Clarke," he said. "Poor devil! They won't have him back at
the hotel, think he's unlucky, a sort of Jonah. His face certainly isn't
his fortune, is it? And I hope you won't mind, Janet, I--"
"You've asked him to be best man instead of Gregory?"
"Well, no, I haven't. But I was sorry for him, and I gave him fifty
pounds. Your money of course. I felt we owed him something for bringing
us together. For you know, in a way, he really _has_, though he has been
some time about it."
Votes for Men[3]
_Two hundred years hence, possibly less._
[3] First Published in 1909.
EUGENIA, _Prime Minister, is sitting at her writing table in her
library. She is a tall, fine looking woman of thirty, rather
untidy and worn in appearance._
EUGENIA [_to herself, taking up a paper_]. There is no doubt that we
must carry through this bill or the future of the country will be
jeopardized.
HENRY [_outside_]. May I come in?
EUGENIA. Do come in, dearest.
HENRY [_a tall, athletic man of thirty, faultlessly dressed, a
contrast to her dusty untidiness_]. I thought I could see the
procession best from here. [_Goes to windows and opens them._] It is
in sight now. They are coming down the wind at a great pace.
EUGENIA [_slightly bored_]. What procession?
HENRY. Why the Men's Reinfranchisement League, of course. You know,
Eugenia, you promised to interview a deputation of them at 5
o'clock, and they determined to have a mass meeting first.
EUGENIA. So they did. I had forgotten. I wish they would not pester me
so. Really, the government has other things to attend to than Male
Suffrage at times like this.
[_The procession sails past the windows in planes decked with the
orange and white colours of the league. The occupants preserve a
dead silence, saluting_ EUGENIA _gravely as they pass. From the
streets far below rises a confused hubbub of men's voices shouting
"Votes for men!"_
HENRY. How stately the clergy look, Eugenia! Why, there are the two
Archbishops in their robes heading the whole procession, and look at
the bevy of Bishops in their lawn sleeves in the great Pullman air
car behind. What splendid men. And here come the clergy in their
academic gowns by the hundred, in open trucks.
EUGENIA. I must say it is admirably organised, and no brawling.
HENRY. Why should they brawl? I believe you are disappointed that they
don't. They are all saluting you, Eugenia, as they pass. They won't
take any notice of me, of course, because it is known I am the
President of the Anti-Suffrage League. The doctors are passing now.
How magnificent they look in their robes! What numbers of them! It
makes me proud I am a man. And now come the lawyers in crowds in
their wigs and gowns.
EUGENIA. Every profession seems to be represented, but of course I am
well aware that it is not the real wish of the men of England to
obtain the vote. The suffragists must do something to convince me
that the bulk of England's thoughtful and intelligent men are not
opposed to it before I move in the matter.
HENRY. I often wonder what would convince you, Eugenia, or what they
could do that they have not done. These must be the authors and
artists and journalists, and quite a number of women with them. Do
you notice that? Look, that is Hobson the poet, and Bagg the
millionaire novelist, each in their own Swallow planes. How they
dart along. I should like to have a Swallow, Eugenia. And are all
those great lumbering tumbrils of men journalists?
EUGENIA. No doubt.
HENRY. It is very impressive. I wish they did not pass so fast, but
the wind is high. Here come all the trades with the Lord Mayor of
London in front! What hordes and hordes of them! The procession is
at least a mile long. And I suppose those are miners and
agricultural labourers, last of all, trying to keep up in those old
Wilbur Wrights and Zeppelins. I did not know there were any left
except in museums.
[_The procession passes out of sight._ EUGENIA _sighs_.
HENRY. Demonstrations like this make a man think, Eugenia. I really
can't see, though you often tell me I do, why men should not have
votes. They used to have them. You yourself say that there is no
real inequality between the sexes. The more I think of it the more I
feel I ought to retire from being President of the Anti-Suffrage
League. And all the men on it are old enough to be my father. The
young men are nearly all in the opposite camp. I sometimes wish I
was there too.
EUGENIA. Henry!
HENRY. Now don't, Eugenia, make any mistake. I abhor the "brawling
brotherhood" as much as you do. I was quite ashamed for my sex when
I saw that bellowing brute riveted to the balcony of your plane the
other day, shouting "Votes for men."
EUGENIA [_coldly_]. That sort of conduct puts back the cause of men's
reinfranchisement by fifty years. It shows how unsuited the sex is
to be trusted with the vote. Imagine that sort of hysterical
screaming in the House itself.
HENRY. But ought the cause to be judged by the folly of a few howling
dervishes? Sometimes it really seems, Eugenia, as if women were
determined to regard the brawling brotherhood as if it represented
the men who seek for the vote. And yet the sad part is that these
brawlers have done more in two years to advance the cause than their
more orderly brothers have achieved in twenty. For years past I
have heard quiet suffragists say that all their efforts have been
like knocking in a padded room. They can't make themselves heard.
Women smiled and said the moment was not opportune. The press gave
garbled accounts of their sayings and doings.
EUGENIA. Your simile is unfortunate. No one wants to emancipate the
only persons who are confined in padded rooms.
HENRY. Not if they are unjustly confined?
EUGENIA [_with immense patience_]. Dear Henry, must we really go over
this old ground again? Men used to have votes as we all know. In the
earliest days of all, of course, both men and women had them. The
ancient records prove that beyond question, and that women presented
themselves with men at the hustings. Then women were practically
disfranchised, and for hundreds of years men ruled alone, though it
was not until near the reign of Victoria the First that by the
interpolation of the word "male" before "persons" in the Reform Act
of 1832 women were legally disfranchised. Men were disfranchised
almost as suddenly in the reign of Man-hating Mary the Second of
blessed memory.
HENRY. I know, I know, but....
EUGENIA [_whose oratorical instincts are not exhausted by her public
life_]. You must remember I would have you all--I mean I would have
you, Henry, remember that men were only disfranchised after the
general election of 2009. It was the wish of the country. We must
bow to that.
HENRY. You mean it was the wish of the women of the country, who were
a million stronger numerically than men.
EUGENIA. It was the wish of the majority, including many thousands of
enlightened men, my grandfather among them, who saw the danger to
their country involved in continued male suffrage. After all, Henry,
it was men who were guilty of the disaster of adult suffrage. Women
never asked for it--they were deeply opposed to it. They only
demanded the suffrage on the same terms that men had it in Edward
the Seventh's time. Adult suffrage was the last important enactment
of men, and one which ought to prove to you, considering the
incalculable harm it did, that men, in spite of their admirable
qualities, are not sufficiently far-sighted to be trusted with a
vote. Adult suffrage lost us India. It all but lost us our Colonies,
for the corner-men and wastrels and unemployed who momentarily
became our rulers saw no use for them. The only good result of adult
suffrage was that women, by the happy chance of their numerical
majority, and with the help of Mary the Man-hater, were able to
combine, to outvote the men and so to seize the reins and abolish
it.
HENRY. And abolish us too.
EUGENIA. It was an extraordinary _coup d'état_, the one good result of
the disaster of adult suffrage. It was a bloodless revolution, but
the most amazing in the annals of history. And it saved the country.
HENRY. I do not deny it. But you can't get away from the fact that men
did give women the vote originally. And now men have lost it
themselves. Why should not women give it back to men--I mean, of
course, only to those who have the same qualifications as to
property as women voters have? After all it was by reason of our
physical force that we were entitled to rule, at least men always
said so. Over and over again they said so in the House, and that
women can't be soldiers and sailors and special constables as we
can. And our physical force remains the greater to this day.
EUGENIA. We do everything to encourage it.
HENRY. Without us, Eugenia, you would have no army, no navy, no
miners. We do the work of the world. We guard and police the nation,
and yet we are not entitled to a hearing.
EUGENIA. Your ignorance of the force that rules the world is assumed
for rhetorical purposes.
HENRY. I suppose you will say brain ought to rule. Well, some of us
are just as able as some of you. Look at our great electricians, our
shipbuilders, our inventors, our astronomers, our poets, nearly all
are men. Shakespeare was a man.
EUGENIA [_sententiously_]. There was a day, and a very short day it
was, when it was said that brain ought to rule. Brain did make the
attempt, but it could no more rule this planet than brute force
could continue to do so. You know, and I know, and every schoolgirl
knows, that what rules the birth-rate rules the world.
HENRY [_for whom this sentiment has evidently the horrid familiarity
of the senna of his childhood_]. It used not to be so.
EUGENIA. It is so now. It is no use arguing; it is merely hysteria to
combat the basic fact that the sex which controls the birth-rate
must by nature rule the nation which it creates. This is not a
question with which law can deal, for nature has decided it.
[HENRY _preserves a paralysed silence_.
EUGENIA [_with benignant dignity_]. I am all for the equality of the
sexes within certain limits, the limits imposed by nature. But the
long and the short of it is, to put it bluntly, no man, my dear
Henry, can give birth to a child, and until he can he will be
ineligible by the laws of nature, not by any woman-made edict, to
govern, and the less he talks about it the better. Sensible men and
older men know that and hold their tongues, and women respect their
silence. Man has his sphere, and a very important and useful sphere
in life it is. The defence of the nation is entrusted to him. Where
should we be without our trusty soldiers and sailors, and, as you
have just reminded me, our admirable police force? Where physical
strength comes in men are paramount. When I think of all the work
men are doing in the world I assure you, Henry, my respect and
admiration for them knows no bounds. But if they step outside their
own sphere of labour, then--
HENRY. But if only you would look into the old records, as I have been
doing, you would see that Lord Curzon and Lord James and Lord
Cromer, and many others employed these same arguments in order to
withhold the suffrage from women.
EUGENIA. I dare say.
HENRY. And there is another thing which does not seem to me to be
fair. Men are so ridiculed if they are suffragists. _Punchinella_
always draws them as obese disappointed old bachelors, and there are
many earnest young married men among the ranks of the suffragists.
Look at the procession which has just passed. Our best men were in
it. And to look at _Punchinella_ or to listen to the speeches in the
House you would think that the men who want the vote are mostly
repulsive old bachelors stung by the neglect of women. Why only last
week the member for Maidenhead, Mrs. Colthorpe it was got up and
said that if only this "brawling brotherhood" of single gentlemen,
who had missed domestic bliss, could find wives they would not
trouble their heads about reinfranchisement.
EUGENIA. There is no doubt there is an element of sex resentment in
the movement, dear Henry. That is why I have always congratulated
myself on the fact that, you, as my husband, were opposed to it.
HENRY. Personally I can't imagine now that women have the upper hand
why they don't keep up their number numerically. It is their only
safeguard against our one day regaining the vote. It was their
numerical majority plus adult suffrage which suddenly put them in
the position to disfranchise men. And yet women are allowing their
number to decline and decline until really for all practical
purposes there seems to be about two men to every woman.
EUGENIA. The laws of nature render our position infinitely stronger
than that of men ever was. We mounted by the ladder of adult
suffrage, but we kicked it down immediately afterwards. It will
never be revived. Men had no tremors about the large surplusage of
women as long as they were without votes. Why should we have any now
about the surplusage of men?
HENRY. Then there is another point. You talk so much about the
importance of the physique of the race, and I agree with all my
heart. But there are so few women to marry nowadays, and women show
such a marked disinclination towards marriage till their youth is
quite over, that half the men I know can't get wives at all. And
those who do, have almost no power of selection left to them, and
are forced to put up with ill-developed, sickly, peevish, or ugly
women past their first bloom rather than remain unmarried and
childless.
EUGENIA. The subject is under consideration at this moment, but when
the position was reversed in Edward the Seventh's time, and there
were not enough men to go round, women were in the same plight, and
men said nothing _then_ about the deterioration of the race. They
did not even make drunkards' marriages a penal offence. Drunkards
and drug-takers, and men dried up by nicotine constantly married and
had children in those days.
HENRY. I can't think the situation was as difficult for women as it is
now for men. I was at Oxford last week, and do you know that during
the last forty years only five per cent. of the male Dons and
Professors have been able to find mates. Women won't look at them.
EUGENIA. In the nineteenth century, when first women went to
Universities and became highly educated, only four per cent. of them
afterwards married, and then to schoolmasters.
HENRY. And I assure you the amount of hysteria and quarrelling among
the older Dons is lamentable.
EUGENIA. I appointed a committee which reported to me on the subject
last year, and I gathered that the present Dons are not more
hysterical than they were in Victorian days, when they forfeited
their fellowships on marriage. You must remember, Henry, that from
the earliest times men and women have always hated anything "blue"
in the opposite sex. Female blue stockings were seldom attractive to
men in bygone days. And nowadays women are naturally inclined to
marry young men, and healthy and athletic men, rather than sedentary
old male blue stockings. It is most fortunate for the race that is
is so.
HENRY [_with a sigh_]. Well, all the "blue" women can marry nowadays.
EUGENIA. Yes, thank heaven, _all_ women can marry nowadays. What women
must have endured in the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth
century makes me shudder. For if they did not marry they were never
spared the ridicule or the contemptuous compassion of men. It seems
incredible, looking back, to realise that large families of
daughters were kept idle and unhappy at home, after their youth was
over, not allowed to take up any profession, only to be turned
callously adrift in their middle age at their father's death, with a
pittance on which they could barely live. And yet these things were
done by educated and kindly men who professed to care for the
interests of women, and were personally fond of their daughters.
Over and over again in the biographies of notable women of the
Victorian and Edward the Seventh's time one comes across instances
of the way in which men of the country-squire type kept their
daughters at home uneducated till they were beyond the age when they
could take up a profession, and then left them to poverty. They did
not even insure their lives for each child as we do now. Surely,
Henry, it is obvious that women have done one thing admirably. The
large reduction which they have effected in their own numbers has
almost eliminated the superfluous, incompetent, unhappy women who
found it so difficult to obtain a livelihood a hundred years ago,
and has replaced them by an extra million competent, educated,
fairly contented men who are all necessary to the State, who are
encouraged, almost forced into various professions.
HENRY. Not contented, Eugenia.
EUGENIA. More contented, because actively employed, than if they were
wandering aimlessly in the country lanes of their fathers' estates
as thousands of intelligent uneducated women were doing a hundred
years ago, kept ferociously at home by the will of the parent who
held the purse-strings.
HENRY. I rather wish I had lived in those good old times, when the
lanes were full of pretty women.
EUGENIA. But you, at any rate, Henry, had a large choice. I was much
afraid at one time that you would never ask me.
HENRY. Ah! But then I was a great heir, and all heirs have a wide
choice. Not that I had any choice at all. I had the good luck to be
accepted by the only woman I ever cared a pin about, and the only
one I was sure was disinterested.
EUGENIA. Dearest!
HENRY [_tentatively_]. And yet our marriage falls short of an ideal
one, my Eugenia.
EUGENIA [_apologetically_]. Dear Henry, I know it does, but as soon as
I cease to be Prime Minister I will do my duty to the country, and,
what I think much more of, by you. What is a home without children?
Besides, I must set an example. When you came in I was framing a
bill to meet the alarming decline of the birth-rate. Unless
something is done the nation will become extinct. The results of
this tendency among women to marry later and later are disastrous.
HENRY. And what is your bill, Eugenia?
EUGENIA. That every healthy married woman or female celibate over
twenty-five and under forty, members of the government excepted,
must do her duty to the State by bringing into the world--
HENRY. Celibate! Bringing into the world! Eugenia! and I thought the
sanctity of marriage and home life were among your deepest
convictions. Just think how you have upheld them to--_men_.
EUGENIA. Patriotism must come first. By bringing into the world three
children, a girl and two boys. If her income is insufficient to rear
them, the State will take charge of them. One extra boy is needed to
supply the wastage of accidents in practical work, and in case of
war. I shall stand or fall by this bill, for unless the women of
England can be aroused to do their duty--unless there is general
conscription to motherhood, as in Germany, England will certainly
become a second-class power.
HENRY. Perhaps when there are two men to every woman we shall be
strong enough to force women to do justice to us.
EUGENIA. Men never did justice to us when they had the upper hand.
HENRY. They did not. And I think the truth lies there. Those who have
the upper hand cannot be just to those who are in their power. They
don't intend to be unfair, but they seem unable to give their
attention to the rights of those who cannot enforce them. Men were
unintentionally unjust to women for hundreds of years. They kept
them down. Now women are unjust to us. Yes, Eugenia, you are. You
keep us down. It seems to be an inevitable part of the _rôle_ of
"top dog," and perhaps it is no use discussing it. If you don't want
your plane, would you mind if I borrow it? I promised to meet
Carlyon at four above the Florence Nightingale column in Anne Hyde's
park, and it is nearly four now.
EUGENIA. Good-bye, Henry. Do take my plane. And I trust there will be
no more doubt in your dear head as to your Presidency of the
Anti-Suffrage League.
HENRY. None. I realise these wrigglings of the under dog are unseemly,
and only disturb the equanimity and good-will of the "top dog."
Good-bye, Eugenia.
The End of the Dream
The first time I saw Essie was a few weeks before her marriage with my
brother Ted. I knew beforehand that she would certainly be very pretty
for the simple reason that Ted would never have been attracted by a
plain woman. For him plain women did not exist, except as cooks,
governesses, caretakers and charwomen.
Ted is the best fellow in the world, and when he brought her to see me I
instantly realised why he had chosen her; but I found myself wondering
why she had chosen him--she was charming, lovely, shy, very young and
diffident, and with the serenest temperament I have ever seen. She was
evidently fond of him, and grateful to him. Later on I learned--from
her, never from him--the distress and anxiety from which he had released
her and her mother. There was a disreputable brother, and other
entanglements, and complicated money difficulties.
Ted simply swooped down, and rescued her, and ordered her to marry him,
which she did.
"She is a cut above me, Essie is," he used to say rubbing his hands, and
looking at her with joyful pride. It was true. Essie looked among us
like a race horse among cart horses. She belonged, not by birth, but by
breeding to a higher social plane than that on which we Hopkinses had
our boisterous being. I was resentfully on the alert to detect the least
sign of arrogance on her part. I expected it. But gradually the
sleepless suspicion of the great middle class to which Ted and I
belonged was lulled to rest. I had to own to myself that Essie was a
simple, humble, and rather timid creature.
I went to stay with them a few months after their marriage in their new
home in Kensington. Ted was outrageously happy, and she seemed well
content, amused by him, rather in the same way that a child is amused by
a large dog.
He had actually suggested before he met Essie that I should keep house
for him, but I told him I preferred to call my soul my own. Essie
apparently did not want to call anything her own. She let him have his
way in everything, and it was a benevolent and sensible way, but it had
evidently never struck him that she might have tastes and wishes even if
she did not put them forward. He was absolutely autocratic, and without
imagination.
Before they had been married a month he had prevailed on her to wear
woollen stockings instead of silk ones, because he always wore woollen
socks himself.
He chose the wallpapers of the house without any reference to her,
though of course she accompanied him everywhere. He chose the chintzes
for the drawing-room, and the curtains, and very good useful materials
they were, not ugly, but of a garish cheerfulness. Indeed, he furnished
the whole house without a qualm, and made it absolutely conventional. It
is strange how very conventional people press towards the mark, how they
struggle to be conventional, when it is only necessary to drift to
become so.
Ted exerted himself, and Essie laughed, and said she liked what he
liked. If she had not been so very pretty her self-effacement would have
seemed rather insipid, but somehow she was not insipid. She liked to see
him happy in his own prosaic efficient inartistic way, and I don't think
she had it in her power to oppose him if she had wanted to, or indeed
anyone. She was by nature yielding, a quality which men like Ted always
find adorable.
I remember an American once watching Ted disporting himself on the
balcony, pushing aside all Essie's tubs of flowering tulips to make room
for a dreadful striped hammock.
"The thing I can't understand about you English women," said the visitor
to Essie, "is why you treat your men as if they were household pets."
"What an excellent description of an English husband," said Essie.
"That is just what he is."
"What's that? What's that?" said Ted, rushing in from the balcony, but
as he never waited for an answer Essie seldom troubled to give him one.
Perhaps I should never have known Essie if I had not fallen ill in her
house. Ted and she were kindness itself, but as I slowly climbed the
hill of convalescence I saw less of him and more of her. He was
constantly away, transacting business in various places, and I must own
a blessed calm fell upon the house when the front door slammed, and he
was creating a lucrative turmoil elsewhere. The weather was hot, and we
sat out evening after evening in the square garden. Gradually, very
gradually, a suspicion had arisen in my mind that there was another
Essie whose existence Ted and I had so far never guessed. I saw that she
did--perhaps by instinct--what wise women sometimes do of set purpose.
She gave to others what they wanted from her, not necessarily the best
she had to give. Ted had received from her exactly what he hoped and
desired, and--he was happy.
The evening came when I made a sudden demand on her sympathy. In the
quiet darkness of the square garden I told her of a certain agonising
experience of my own which in one year had pushed me from youth into
middle age, and had turned me not to stone, but into a rolling stone.
"I imagined it was something of that kind that was the matter with you,"
she said in her gentle rather toneless voice.
"You guessed it," I said amazed. I had thought I was a closed book to
the whole world. "You never spoke of your idea to Ted?"
"Never. Why should I?"
There was a long silence.
The noise of Kensington High Street reached us like the growl of some
tired animal. An owl came across from Holland Park and alighted in a
tree near us.
"You should have married him," said Essie at last.
"Married him!" I exclaimed, "but you don't understand." And I went over
the whole dreadful story again--at full length. Love affairs are never
condensed. If they are told at all they are recounted in full.
"I don't see that any of those things matter," she said when I had
finished, or rather when I paused.
"Where is he now?"
"In Turkistan, I believe."
"Why not go to Turkistan?" She spoke as if it were just round the
corner.
"Turkistan!"
"Well, it's somewhere on the map, I suppose. What does it matter where
it is."
"And perhaps when I got there I might find he had set up a harem of
Turkistan women."
"You might."
"Or that he had long since left for America."
"Just so."
"Or that he did not want me."
"All these things are possible."
The owl began to call through the dusk, and, not far away, somewhere in
the square a gentle lady owl's voice answered him.
"There are things," said Essie, "which one can measure, and it is easy
to know how to act about them, and whether it is worth while to act at
all. Most things one can measure, but there are in life just a few
things, a very few, which one cannot measure, or put a value on, or pay
a certain price for, and no more, because they are on a plane where
foot-rules and weighing machines and money do not exist. Love is one of
these things. When we begin to weigh how much we will give to love, what
we are willing to sacrifice for it, we are trying to drag it down to a
mercantile basis and to lay it on the table of the money changers on
which things are bought and sold, and bartered and equivalent value
given."
"You think I don't love him," I said, cut to the quick.
"I am sure," said Essie, "that you don't love him yet, but I think you
are on the road. Who was it who said
'The ways of love are harder
Than thoroughfares of stones.'
Whoever it was, he knew what he was talking about. You have found the
thoroughfare stony, and you rebel and are angry, very angry, and desert
your fellow traveller. He, poor man, did not make the road. I expect he
is just as angry and foot-sore as you are."
"He was a year ago. I don't know what he is now. It is a year since he
wrote."
Essie knitted in silence.
At last I said desperately:
"I have told you everything. Do you think it's possible he still cares
for me?"
Essie waited a long minute before answering.
"I don't know," she said, and then added, "but I think you will
presently go to Turkistan and find out."
Reader, I went to Turkistan, and was married there, and lived there and
in Anatolia for many happy years. But that is another story. I did not
start on that voyage of discovery till several months after that
conversation. I had battered myself to pieces against the prison bars of
my misery, and health ruthlessly driven away was slow to return.
As I lived with Ted and Essie I became aware that he was becoming
enormously successful in money matters. There were mysterious
expeditions, buyings and sellings of properties, which necessitated
sudden journeys. Immense transactions passed through his competent
hands, and presently the possibility of a country house was spoken of.
He talked mysteriously of a wonderful old manor house in Essex, which he
had come upon entirely by chance, which would presently come into the
market, and which might be acquired much below its value, so anxious was
the owner--a foreign bigwig--to part with it at once.
Ted prosed away about this house from teatime till bedtime. Essie
listened dutifully, but it was I who asked all the questions.
Ted hurried away next morning, not to return for several days, one of
which he hoped to spend in Essex.
"You don't seem much interested about the country house," I said at tea
time. I was slightly irritated by the indifference which seemed to
enwrap Essie's whole existence.
"Don't you care about it? It must be beautiful from Ted's account."
"If he likes it I shall like it."
"What a model wife you are. Have you no wishes of your own, no tastes of
your own, Essie?"
She looked at me with tranquil eyes.
"I think Ted is happy," she said, "and I am so glad the children are
both exactly like him."
"Yes, but--"
"There is no _but_ in my case. Ted rescued me from an evil entanglement
and eased my mother's life. And he set his kind heart on marrying me. I
told him I could not give him much, but he did not mind. I don't think
men like Ted understand that there is anything more that--that might be
given; which makes a very wonderful happiness when it _is_ given. Our
marriage was on the buying and selling plane. We each put out our wares.
I saw very well that he would be impossible--for me at least--to live
with unless I gave way to him entirely. Dear Ted is a benevolent tyrant.
He would become a bully if he were opposed, and bullies are generally
miserable. I don't oppose him. I think he is content with his bargain,
and as fond of me as a man can be of a lay figure. My impression is that
he regards me as a model wife."
"He does, he does. He is absolutely, blissfully happy."
"He would be just as happy with another woman," said Essie, "if she were
almost inanimate. It was a comfort to me to remember that when I nearly
died three years ago."
"Yes, Ted is all right," I said, "but how about you? I used to think you
were absolutely characterless, and humdrum, but I know better now. Don't
you--miss anything?"
"No," said Essie, "nothing. You see," she added tranquilly with the
faintest spice of malice, "I lead a double life."
I gasped, staring at her open-mouthed, horror-stricken. She ignored my
crass imbecility, and went on quietly:
"I don't know when it began, but I suppose when I was about five years
old. I found my way to the enchanted forest, and I went there in my
dreams every night."
"In your dreams!" I stuttered, enormously reassured, and idiotically
hoping that she had not noticed my hideous lapse.
"In my dreams. I had an unhappy childhood, but I never was unhappy any
more after I learned the way through the forest. Directly I fell asleep
I saw the track among the tree trunks, and then after a few minutes I
reached the wonderful glade and the lake, and the little islands. One of
the islands had a temple on it. I fed the swans upon the lake. I twined
garlands of flowers. I climbed the trees, and looked into the nests. I
swung from tree to tree, and I swam from island to island. I made a
little pipe out of a reed from the lake, and blew music out of it. And
the rabbits peeped out of their holes to listen, and the squirrels came
hand by hand along the boughs, and the great kites with their golden
eyes came whirling down. Even the little moles came up out of the ground
to listen."
I gazed at her, astonished.
"I did not wear any clothes," said Essie, "and I used to lie on the
moss in the sun. It is delicious to lie on moss, warm moss in the sun.
Once when I was a small child I asked my governess when those happy days
would come back when we should wear no clothes, and she told me I was
very naughty. I never spoke to her of the dream forest again. She did
not understand any more than you did the first moment. I think the
natural instinct of the British mind if it does not understand is to
look about for a lurking impropriety. I saw other children sometimes,
but never close at hand. They went to the temple singing, garlanded and
gay, but when I tried to join them I passed through them. They never
took any notice of me."
"Were you a ghost?"
"I think not. I imagine I am an old old soul who has often been in this
world before, and by some strange accident I have torn a corner of the
veil that hides our past lives from us, and in my dreams I became once
more a child as I had really been once, hundreds and hundreds of years
ago, perhaps in Greece or Italy."
"And do you still have that dream every night?"
"Not for many years past. I lost my way to the forest for several years,
until I was again in great trouble. That was when--then one night when I
had cried myself to sleep I saw the same track through the thicket, and
I found the forest again. Oh! how I rejoiced! And in the middle of the
forest was a garden and a wonderful old house, standing on a terrace.
And there was no lake any more. It was a different place altogether, in
England no doubt. And the house door was open. It was a low arched door
with a coat of arms carved in stone over it. And I went in. And as I
entered all care left me, and I was happy again, as I was among the
islands in the lake. I can't tell you why I was so happy. I have
sometimes asked myself, but it is a question I can't answer. It seemed
my real home. I have gone back there every night since I was seventeen,
and I know the house by heart. There is only one room I shrink from,
though it is one of the most beautiful in the house. It is a small
octagonal panelled room leading out of the banqueting hall where the
minstrels gallery is. It looks on to the bowling green, and one large
picture hangs in it, over the carved mantelpiece. A Vandyck I think it
must be. It is a portrait of a cavalier with long curls holding his
plumed hat in his hand."
"Did you meet people in the house?"
"No, not at first, not for several years, but I did not miss them. I did
not want companionship; I felt that I was with friends, and that was
enough. I wanted the repose, and the beauty and the peace which I always
found there. I steeped myself in peace, and brought it back with me to
help me through the day. The night was never long enough for me. And I
always came back, rested, and refreshed, and content, oh! so deeply
content. I am a very lucky person, Beatrice."
"It explains you at last," I said. "You have always been to me an
enigma, during the five years I have known you."
"The explanation was too simple for you."
"Do you call it simple? I don't. I should hardly be able to believe it
if it were not you who had told me. And the house was always empty? You
never saw anyone there?"
"It was never empty, but I could not see the people who lived in it. I
could see nothing clearly, and I had no desire to pry or search. I was
often conscious of someone near me, who loved me and whom I loved. And I
could hear music sometimes, and sweet voices singing, but I could never
find the room where the music was. But then I did not try to find it.
Sometimes when I looked out of the windows I could see a dim figure
walking up and down the terrace, but not often."
"Was it a man or a woman?"
"A man."
"And you never went out to the bowling green and spoke to him?"
"I never thought of such a thing. I never even saw his face till--till
that Christmas I was so ill with pneumonia. Then I fled to the house,
and for the first time I could find no rest in it. And I went into the
octagonal room, and sat down near the window and leaned my forehead
against the glass. My head was burning hot, and the glass was hot too.
Everything was hot. And there was a great dreadful noise of music. And
suddenly it seemed as if I went deeper into the life of the house, where
the light was clearer. It was as if a thin veil were withdrawn from
everything. And the heat and the pain were withdrawn with the veil. And
I was light and cool, and at ease once more. And the music was like a
rippling brook. And _he_ came into the room. I saw him quite clearly at
last. And oh! Beatrice, he was the cavalier of the picture, dressed in
blue satin with a sword. And he stood before me with his plumed hat in
his hand.
"And as I looked at him a gentle current infinitely strong seemed to
take me. I floated like a leaf upon it. I think, Beatrice, it was the
current of death. I felt it was bearing me nearer and nearer to him and
to my real life, and leaving further and further behind my absurd little
huddled life here in Kensington, which always _has_ seemed rather like a
station waitingroom.
"We neither of us spoke, but we understood each other, and we loved each
other. We had long loved each other. I saw that. And presently he knelt
down at my feet and kissed my hands. Doesn't that sound commonplace,
like a cheap novelette? but it wasn't. It wasn't ... and then as we
looked at each other the gentle sustaining current seemed to fail
beneath me. I struggled, but it was no use. It ebbed slowly away from
me, leaving me stranded on an aching shore alone, in the dark, where I
could not breathe or move. And I heard our doctor say, "she is going."
But I wasn't going. I had nearly, nearly gone, and I was coming back.
And then there was a great turmoil round me, and I came back in agony
into my own room and my own bed, and found the doctor and nurse beside
me giving me oxygen, and poor Ted as white as a sheet standing at the
foot of the bed.... They forced me to--to stay. I had to take up life
again."
And for the first time in all the years I had known her Essie was shaken
with sudden weeping.
"That was three years ago," she said brokenly.
For a time we sat in silence hand in hand.
"And do you still go back there?"
"Every night."
"And you meet him?"
"Yes and no. I am sometimes aware of his presence, but I never see him
clearly as I did that once. I think at that moment I was able to see him
because I was so near death that I was very close to those on the other
side of death. My spirit had almost freed itself from the body, so I
became visible to him and he to me. I have studied the pictures of
Charles the First's time, and his dress was exactly of that date, almost
the same as that well-known picture--I think it is Charles the First--of
a man with his hand on his hip, standing beside a white horse. Do you
think it is wrong of me to have a ghostly lover, who must have lived
nearly three hundred years ago?"
"Not wrong, but strange. It is a little like "The Brushwood Boy," and
"Peter Ibbetson," and Stella Benson's "This is the end." I suppose we
have all been on this earth before, but the cup of Lethe is well mixed
for most of us, and we have no memory of previous lives. But you have
not drunk the cup to the dregs, and somehow you have made a hole in the
curtain of oblivion in two places. Through one of those holes you saw
one of your many childhoods, probably in Greece, a couple of thousand
years ago. Through the other hole you saw, in comparatively modern times
your early womanhood. Perhaps you married your beautiful cavalier with
the curls."
"No," said Essie with decision, "I have never been married to him, or
lived in his house. It is my home, but I have never lived there. I know
nothing about him except that we love each other, and that some day we
shall really meet, not in a dream."
"In the Elysian fields?"
"Yes, in the Elysian fields."
At this moment the front door slammed, and Ted banged up the stairs, and
rushed in. If I had not known him I should have said he was drunk.
He was wildly excited, he was crimson. He careered round the room
waving his arms, and then plumped on to the sofa, and stretched out his
short legs in front of him.
"I've bought it. I've got it," he shouted. "Do you hear? I've bought it
dirt cheap. The young ass is in such a hurry, and he's apparently so
wealthy he doesn't care. And two hundred acres of timber with it. Such
timber. Such walnut, and chestnut and oak. The timber alone is worth the
money, I've got it. It's mine."
"The house in Essex?"
"Kenstone Manor, in Essex. It's a nailer. It's a--a--an old world
residence. It has no central heating, no bathrooms, no electric light,
obsolete drainage and the floors are giving way. I shall have to put in
everything, but I shall do it without spending a penny. I shall do it by
the timber, and it's nine miles from a station, that's partly why no one
wanted it. But the railroad is coming. No one knows that yet except a
few of us, but it will be there in five years, with a station on the
property. Then I shall sell all the land within easy reach of the
station in small building lots for villas. I shall make a pile."
Ted's round eyes became solemn. He was gazing into the future, leaning
forward, a stout hand on each stout knee.
"Teddy shall go to Eton," he said, "and I shall put him in the Guards."
A week later Ted took us down by motor to see Kenstone. It was too far
for us to return the same day, so he engaged rooms for us in the village
inn. His "buyer" was to meet him, and advise him as to what part of the
contents of the house he should offer to take over by private treaty
before the sale.
On a gleaming day in late September we sped along the lovely Essex
lanes, between the pale harvested fields.
"There's the forest," shouted Ted, leaning back from his seat in front,
and pointing to a long ridge of trees which seemed to stretch to the low
horizon beyond the open fields.
"When we're over the bridge we're on the--the property," yelled Ted.
We lurched over the bridge, and presently the forest came along the
water's edge to meet us, and we turned sharply through an open gateway
into a private road.
Such trees I had never seen. They stood in stately groups of birch and
oak and pine with broad glades of grass and yellowing bracken between
them.
"Ancient deer park once," shouted Ted. "Shall be again."
Essie paid little attention to him. We had made a very early start, and
she was tired. She leaned back in the car with half closed eyes.
The trees retreated on each side of the road, and the wonderful old
house came suddenly into sight, standing above its long terrace with its
stone balustrade.
Ted gave a sort of yelp.
"Oh Essie!" I cried. "Look--look! It's perfect."
She gazed languidly for a moment, and then she sat up suddenly, and her
face changed. She stared wildly at the house, and put out her hands as
if to ward it off.
The car sped up to the arched doorway, with its coat of arms cut in grey
stone, and Ted leaped out and rushed up the low steps to the bell.
"Not here! Not here!" gasped Essie, clinging to the car. "I can't live
here." She was trembling violently.
"Dear Essie," I said amazed, "we can't remain in the car. Pull yourself
together, and even if you don't like the place don't hurt Ted's feelings
by showing it."
She looked at me like one dazed, and inured to obedience got out, and we
followed Ted into the house. We found ourselves in a large square hall.
She groaned and leaned against the wall.
"I can't bear it," she whispered to me. "It's no use, I can't bear it."
"A glass of water, quick," I said to Ted, who turned beaming to us
expecting a chorus of admiration. "Essie is overtired."
"What is the matter?" I said to her as he hurried away. "What's wrong
with this exquisite place?"
"It's the house I come to at night," she said brokenly. "The dream
house. I knew it directly I saw it. Look! There's the minstrels'
gallery."
I could only stare at her amazed.
Kind Ted hurried back, splashing an overfull tumbler of water as he
came, on the polished oak floor.
She sipped a little, but her hands shook so much that I had to hold the
glass for her.
"Cheero, old girl," said Ted, patting her cheek, but Essie did not
cheero.
"The lady ought to lie down," said the old woman who had opened the door
to us. "There's a sofy in the morning-room."
I supported Essie into an octagonal room leading out of the great hall,
and laid her on a spacious divan of dim red damask.
"Leave her alone with me for a bit," I said to Ted. "She is overwrought.
We made a very early start."
"I seem to have gone blind," she whispered when Ted had departed.
"Everything is black."
"You turned faint. You will be all right in a few minutes."
"Shall I? Would you mind telling me, Beatrice, is there--is there a
picture over the fireplace?"
"Yes."
"What kind of picture?"
"It is a life-size portrait of a young cavalier with curls, in blue
satin, holding his hat in his hand."
"I knew it," she groaned.
There was a long silence.
"I can't bear it," she said. "You may say that is silly, Beatrice, but
all the same I can't. My life will break in two. If Ted lives here--I
shall have nowhere to go."
"I don't think it silly, dear, but I don't understand. This is your old
home where you lived nearly three hundred years ago, and to which you
have so often come back in your dreams. Now you are coming back to it as
your home once more. It seems to me a beautiful and romantic thing to
have happened, and after the first surprise surely it must seem the same
to you. You have always been so happy here."
"I can see a little now," she said. "Where is the glass of water?"
She sat up and drank a little, and then dabbed some of the water on her
forehead.
"I'm all right now," she said, pushing back her wet hair.
"Don't move. Rest a little; you have had a shock."
She did not seem to hear me. She rose slowly to her feet, and stood in
front of the picture.
"Yes," she said to the cavalier. "It's you, only not quite you either.
You are not really as handsome as that you know, and you have a firmer
mouth and darker brows."
The cavalier smiled at her from the wall: a somewhat insipid
supercilious face I thought, but a wonderful portrait.
The old caretaker came back.
"The gentleman said you'd be the better for something to eat," she said,
"and that you would take it in the hall."
Through the open door I saw the chauffeur unstrapping the baskets from
Fortnum and Mason.
"Whose portrait is that?" said Essie.
"Henry Vavasour Kenstone," said the old woman in a parrot voice.
"Equerry to our martyred King, by Vandyck. You will observe the jewelled
sword and the gloves sewed with pearls. The sword and the gloves are
preserved in the banqueting 'all in a glass case."
Essie turned away from the picture, and sat down feebly by the window.
The clinking of plates, and Ted's cheerful voice reached us, and the
drawing of a cork.
"Our Mr. Rupert, the present owner, favours the picture," said the woman
proudly in her natural voice, "and when he come of age three years ago
last Christmas there was a grand fancy ball and 'e was dressed exackerly
to match the picture, with a curled wig and all. And 'e wore the actual
sword, and the very gloves, at least 'e 'eld 'em in 'is 'and. They was
too stiff to put on. 'E did look a picture. And 'is mother being Spanish
'ad a lace shawl on 'er 'ead, a duchess she was in 'er own right, and
she might a been a queen to look at her. I watched the dancing from the
gallery, me having been nurse in the family, and a beautiful sight it
was."
Essie's dark eyes were fixed intently on the garrulous old servant.
"Three years ago last Christmas," she said sharply. "Are you sure of
that?"
"And wouldn't I be sure that took 'im from the month ma'am, but 'e don't
look so like the picture when 'e ain't dressed to match, and without the
yaller wig," and she wandered out of the room, evidently more interested
in the luncheon preparations than in us.
Ted hurried in. When was he not in a hurry?
"Luncheon, luncheon," he said. "Don't wait for me, Essie. Rather too
long a drive for my little woman. Give her a glass of port, Beatrice. I
have to see Rodwell about the roof. Shan't be half a mo. He's got to
catch his train. Mr. Kenstone, the Duke, I mean, will be here in ten
minutes. If he turns up before I'm back give him a snack. They've sent
enough for ten."
We did not go in to luncheon.
Essie sank down on the divan. I sat down by her, and put my arms round
her. She leaned her head against my shoulder.
"You heard what that woman said," she whispered. "You see he did not
live hundreds of years ago as I thought. The dress deceived me. He's
alive now. He's twenty-four."
My heart ached for her, but I could find no word to comfort her in her
mysterious trouble.
As we looked out together through the narrow latticed windows the lines
came into my mind:
" casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn."
It seemed to me that poor Essie was indeed a captive in some "faery land
forlorn," and that invisible perilous seas were foaming round her
casement windows.
She gave a slight shudder, and started up.
A man was walking slowly up and down the bowling green.
"It is he," she said. "I've seen him walk there a hundred times."
She watched the tall dignified figure pace up and down, and then turned
her eyes from him to me. They were wide, and the pupils dilated.
"Beatrice," she said solemnly, "I must not meet that man. He must not
see me, for his sake, and for mine. All his life long he must go on
thinking as he does now, that I am ... a dream."
"The old woman says he starts for Spain to-day."
Ted's roundabout figure was suddenly seen trundling out across the grass
towards the distant pacing figure.
"Who is that?" said Essie frowning.
"Who is that? Why, it's Ted of course."
"And who is Ted?"
"Who is Ted?" I echoed staring at her. "What on earth do you mean?"
She seemed to make a great mental effort.
"Yes," she said. "Yes. It is Ted. _My husband._ I forgot. You see I've
never seen him _here_ before."
"You will soon grow accustomed to seeing him here," I said cheerfully.
She shook her head.
The two men met, and moved together towards the house.
Essie looked round her in sudden panic.
"I can't stay here," she said. "It's a trap. Where can I go?"
Her eyes searched the room. There was no other door in it. She looked at
the narrow latticed windows. Her eyes came back to me with sheer terror
in them, such as I have seen in a snared wild animal.
"You _must_ stay here," I said, "if you don't want to meet him. They
will reach the open door into the garden long before you could cross
the hall. Stay quietly where you are, and I will tell Ted you are
unwell, and are resting."
The two men were already in the hall. I went out to them, closing the
door resolutely behind me.
Rupert Maria Wenceslao di Soto, Duke of Urrutia, was a tall grave young
man of few words, with close cropped hair and a lean clean shaven face.
Ted introduced him to me, and then pressed him to have some luncheon.
The long table down the banqueting hall shewed an array of which Fortnum
and Mason might justly have been proud.
The Duke was all courtesy and thanks, but had already lunched. His car
would be here in ten minutes to take him to London. If agreeable to Mr.
Hopkins he would say one word on business. He had called to modify his
agent's letter about the mantelpieces. He was willing to sell them all
as agreed at a valuation, except one.
"Which one?" asked Ted, instantly changing from the exuberant host into
the cautious business man.
"The one in the south parlour," said the Duke, waving his hand towards
the door of the room in which was Essie. "I desire to make it clear, as
my agent has not done so, that everything in that room I intend to take
with me, so that in my future home in the Pyrenees there may be one
chamber exactly the same as my late mother's room in my old home here."
The explanation quite bowled over Ted. The business man gave way to the
man of sentiment.
"Most creditable, I'm sure. Filial piety, most creditable. I don't
recall the mantlepiece in question, but of course as your Grace wishes
to keep it, I agree at once. Between gentlemen, no difficulties,
everything open to arrangement, amicable settlement."
The old woman, dissolved in tears, interrupted Ted's eloquence to tell
"Mr. Rupert" that his car was at the door.
The Duke led her gently out of the hall, his hand on her shoulder, and
then came back.
"I will detain you no longer from your luncheon," he said. "With your
permission I will spend a few moments in my mother's chamber. It has
many beautiful associations for me. I should like to see it once more
before I leave for Spain."
Ted hastened towards the door, but I barred the way.
"Dear Ted," I said, "Essie is very ill. No one must go in."
"No one go in!" said Ted flushing darkly. "I am astonished at you,
Beatrice. The Duke wishes to see his mother's room once more, on bidding
farewell to his ancestral home, and you take upon yourself to forbid
it."
"My sister-in-law is ill," I said, addressing the Duke, "it would
distress her if a stranger were to go in suddenly."
"I understand perfectly, Madam," he said coldly, and made as if to take
his leave.
"Stop," said Ted, purple in the face. "My wife _is_ unwell. She is
overtired, but she is the kindest, most tender-hearted woman in the
world. It would cut her to the heart if she found out afterwards she had
prevented your Grace's seeing this room for the last time. Wait one
moment, while I go in and explain it to her, and help her to walk a few
steps to the settle here."
And Ted, with a furious glance at me, pushed past me, and went into the
room.
"It would be a great kindness to my sister, who is very nervous," I said
to the Duke, "if you would wait a moment in the garden."
He instantly went towards the open door into the garden. Then I darted
after Ted. Between us we would hurry Essie into one of the many other
rooms that opened into the hall.
She was standing by the window frantically endeavouring to break the
lattice of the central casement, which was a little larger than the
others.
There was blood on her hand.
Ted was speaking, but she cut him short.
"Not in here," she said passionately. "I won't have it. He mustn't come
in here."
"He must come in if I say so," said Ted. The colour had left his face. I
had seen him angry before now, but never so angry as this.
"No," said Essie, "he must not."
She came and stood before her husband.
"Haven't I been a good wife to you these five years past," she said.
"Haven't I done my best to make you happy? Haven't I obeyed you in
everything, everything, everything--till now?"
He stared at her open-mouthed. She had never opposed him before.
She fell on her knees before him, and clasped his feet with her bleeding
hands.
"If you love me," she said, "send him away. I refuse to see him."
"You are hysterical," said Ted, "or else you're stark staring mad. I've
spoilt you and given way to you till you think you can make any kind of
fool of me. Get up at once, and cease this play acting, and come into
the hall."
"He's in the garden," I broke in. "You can pass through the hall,
Essie."
She rose to her feet, and her vehemence dropped from her. Her eyes were
rivetted on Ted. She paid no heed to what I said. She had no attention
to give to anything but her husband.
"I will not come out," she said, and she sat down again on the divan.
"Then by--he shall come in," said Ted, and before I could stop him he
strode to the door, calling loudly to the Duke to enter.
There was a moment's pause, in which we heard a step cross the hall.
Then the Duke came in, and Ted introduced him to Essie. She bowed
slightly, but he did not. He stared at her, transfixed, overwhelmed.
At that moment the discreet voice of Mr. Rodwell was heard in the
doorway.
"Can I have one last word, Mr. Hopkins? A matter of some importance."
"Yes, yes," said Ted darting to the door, thankful to escape. As he left
the room he said to me, "Take Essie at once into the hall. At once, do
you hear?"
He might as well have said, "Take her to the moon."
The Duke and Essie gazed at each other with awed intentness. There was
sheer amazement on his face, blank despair on hers. They were entirely
absorbed in each other. As I stood in the background I felt as if I were
a ghost, that no word of mine could reach their world.
At last he spoke, stammering a little.
"Madam, on the night of my coming of age I left the dancers, and came in
here, and behold! you were sitting on that divan, all in white."
"Yes," said Essie.
"We saw each other for the first time," he said, trembling exceedingly.
"Yes."
"And I knelt at your feet."
"Yes."
A suffocating compassion overcame me. It was unendurable to pry upon
them, oblivious as they were of my presence. I left the room.
"He will go out of her life in five minutes," I said to myself, "never
to return. Poor souls. Poor souls. Let them have their say."
I had never seen Romance before, much less such a fantastic romance as
this, in a faery land as forlorn as this. My heart ached for them.
Presently I heard Ted's voice in the distance shouting a last message to
the departing Rodwell, and I went back to the octagonal room.
He was kneeling at her feet, her pale hands held in his, and his face
bowed down upon them.
"You must go," she said faintly.
He shuddered.
"You must go," she repeated. "To me you can only be a picture. To you I
am only a dream."
"Yes, it is time to go," I said suddenly in a hoarse voice. I obliged
them to look at me, to listen to me.
Slowly he released her hands, and got upon his feet. He was like a man
in a trance.
"Go! Go!" I said sharply. Something urgent in my voice seemed to reach
his shrouded faculties.
He looked in bewildered despair at Essie.
"Go!" she repeated with agonised entreaty, paler than I had ever seen a
living creature.
Still like a man in a trance he walked slowly from the room, passing Ted
in the doorway without seeing him. In the silence that followed we heard
his motor start and whirl away.
"He's gone," said Essie, and she fainted.
We had considerable difficulty in bringing her round, and, angry as I
was with Ted, I could not help being sorry for him when for some long
moments it seemed as if Essie had closed her eyes on this world for
good.
But Ted, who always knew what to do in an emergency, tore her back by
sheer force from the refuge to which she had fled, and presently her
mournful eyes opened and recognised us once more. We took her back in
the motor to the village inn, and I put her to bed.
Rest, warmth, silence, nourishment, these were all I could give her.
Instinctively I felt that the presence of the remorseful distressed Ted
was unendurable to her, and I would not allow him to come into her room,
or to sit up with her as he was anxious to do.
I took his place in an armchair at her bedside, having administered to
her a sedative which I fortunately had with me, and was profoundly
thankful when her even breathing shewed me that she was asleep.
I have known--who has not?--interminable nights, and nights when I
dreaded the morning, but I think the worst of them was easier to bear
than the night I kept watch beside Essie.
She was stricken. I could see no happiness for her in her future life,
and I loved her. And I loved poor blundering Ted also. I grieved for
them both. And I was sorry for the Duke too.
When the dawn was creeping ghostlike into the room and the night-light
was tottering in its saucer, Essie stirred and woke. She lay a long time
looking at me, an unfathomable trouble in her eyes.
"Beatrice," she said at last, "I could not find the way back."
"Where, dearest?"
"To the house. I tried and tried, but it was no use. It is lost, lost,
lost. Everything is lost."
I did not answer. I tried to put my trust in Time, and in the thought
that she would presently see her children in its rooms and playing in
its gardens, and would realise that Kenstone was in a new sense her
home, though not in the old one.
I brought her breakfast to her in her room, and then, in spite of my
entreaties, she got up and dressed and came downstairs. But when a
chastened and humble Ted timidly approached her to ask whether she would
like to see the house once more before returning to London in a few
hours time, she shook her head and averted her eyes. It was evident to
me that she was determined never to set foot in it again.
He did not insist, and she was obviously relieved when he left the room.
He signed to me to follow him and then told me that he had just received
a letter from the Duke asking him to accept the Vandyck in the octagonal
room as a present, as on second thoughts he felt it belonged to the
house and ought to remain there. The Duke had not started after all, as
his ship had been delayed one day. He wrote from the house close at hand
where he had been staying till his departure.
"It's worth thousands," said Ted. "Thousands. These bigwigs are queer
customers. What an awful fool he is to part with it just out of
sentiment. But of course I shall never sell it. It shall be an heirloom.
I've told him so," and Ted thrust the letter into his pocket and hurried
away.
Our rooms were airless, and Essie allowed me to establish her in a
wicker armchair under a chestnut tree in the old-fashioned inn garden
still brave with Michaelmas daisies and purple asters. The gleaming
autumn morning had a touch of frost in it. I wrapped her fur motor cloak
round her, and put her little hat on her head. She remained passive in
my hands in a kind of stupor. Perhaps that might be the effect of the
sedative I told myself. But I knew it was not so.
Essie was drinking her cup of anguish to the dregs. She did not rebel
against it. She accepted her fate with dumb docility. She was not
bearing it. She was not capable of an effort of any kind. She underwent
it in silence.
I told her to try to sleep again, and she smiled wanly at me and
obediently closed her eyes. As I went into the house to snatch an hour's
rest and pack I turned and looked back at her motionless figure sunk
down in her chair, her little grey face, pinched and thin like a
squirrel's against the garish hotel cushion, her nerveless hands lying
half open, palm upwards on her knee.
A faint breeze stirred, and from the yellow tree a few large fronded
leaves of amber and crimson eddied slowly down, and settled, one on her
breast and the others in the grass at her feet. She saw them not. She
heeded them not. She heeded nothing. Her two worlds had clashed
together, and the impact had broken both. They lay in ruins round her.
And so I looked for the last time on Essie.
* * * * *
Reader, I thought I could write this story to the end, but the pen
shakes in my hand. The horror of it rushes back upon me. Ted's surprise
at hearing that the Duke had gone to Essie in the garden, and that he
had persuaded her to drive with him to London. Then his growing anxiety
and continually reiterated conviction that we should find her in London,
his uncomprehending fury when we reached London and--she was not there.
And then at last his tardy realisation and desolation.
I did what little I could to blunt the edge of his suffering when the
first fever fit of rage was past.
"Dear Ted, she did not like the house. She told me she could not live in
it."
"But she would have liked it when I had gutted it. I should have
transformed it entirely. Electric light, bathrooms, central heating,
radiators, dinner lift, luggage lift," Ted's voice broke down, and
struggled on in a strangled whisper. "Inglenooks, cosy corners, speaking
tubes, telephone, large French windows to the floor. She would not have
known it again."
He hid his face in his hands.
I almost wished the paroxysms of anger back again.
"Oh! Beatrice, to leave me for another man when we were so happy
together, because of a house; and an entire stranger, whom she did not
want even to speak to, whom she was positively rude to. It could not
have been our little tiff, could it? She must have been mad."
"You have hit on the truth," I said. "She was mad, quite mad. And mad
people always turn against those whom they--love best."
* * * * *
It is all a long time ago. I married a year later, and a year later
still Ted married again, a sensible good-humoured woman, and was just
as happy as he had been with Essie, happier even. In time he forgot her,
but I did not. She had sailed away across "perilous seas." She had
passed beyond my ken. I could only hold her memory dear. And at last she
became to me, what for so many years she had been to her lover--a dream.
W. HEFFER & SONS LTD., CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND.
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| |
| TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES |
| |
| * This text has been preserved as in the original, including |
| archaic and inconsistent spelling, punctuation and grammar, |
| except as noted below. |
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| * Page numbers referenced herein are those in the original work |
| and are for information. Actual location of changes may be |
| found by searching for the relevant text. |
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| * Spelling changes are shown below within single quotes. Changes |
| regarding punctuation are shown below in curly brackets, { }, |
| for clarity. |
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| * Changes made to the original text: |
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| illusions. He's}. |
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| problem:}. |
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| Westminster."}. |
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| another house within miles.} changed to {'How kind of you |
| to call me in. There is not another house within miles.'}. |
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| thunderstorm passed}. |
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| Robinson is an egregious}. |
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| crumbs?}. |
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| Giles, everyone seems to}. |
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| sickness."}. |
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| taken several prizes.}. |
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| mistake. I abhor}. |
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| I told him}. |
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| us spoke}. |
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| * Page 240: {Who is Ted?" I echoed staring at her. 'What on} |
| changed to {"Who is Ted?" I echoed staring at her. "What on}. |
| |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
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