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Mrs. Warren's Daughter: A Story of the Woman's Movement

by Harry Johnston · English · Gutenberg #15380 · 741,702 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Mrs. Warren's Daughter: A Story of the Woman's Movement

Author: Harry Johnston


        
Release date: March 16, 2005 [eBook #15380]
                Most recently updated: December 14, 2020

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MRS. WARREN'S DAUGHTER: A STORY OF THE WOMAN'S MOVEMENT ***




Produced by Janet Kegg and the Project Gutenberg Online
Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net/)







MRS. WARREN'S DAUGHTER

A Story of the Woman's Movement

By

SIR HARRY JOHNSTON

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1920


                      TO

              MY JURY OF MATRONS:

     WINIFRED JOHNSTON     ELLA HEPWORTH-DIXON
     CATHERINE WELLS       ANGELA MOND
     BEATRICE SANDS        MARGARET POWYS
     ANNETTE HENDERSON     FLORENCE FELLOWES
     MARY LEVY             RAY ROCKMAN-BRAHAM
     FLORENCE TRAVERS      MAUD PARRY


       THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED,
     IN THE KNOWLEDGE THAT--IN THE MAIN--IT HAS
           THEIR SYMPATHY AND APPROVAL.

                             H. H. JOHNSTON

     POLING,
     _March, 1920_




PREFACE


The earlier part of Vivien Warren's life and that of her mother,
Catherine Warren, was told by Mr. George Bernard Shaw in his play,
"Mrs. Warren's Profession," published first in 1898.

(_Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant_: 1. _Unpleasant_. Constable and
Co., 6th Edition.)

I have his permission to continue the story from 1898 onwards. To
understand my sequel it is not necessary to have read the play which
so brilliantly placed the Warren problem before us. But as most
persons of average good education have found Mr. Shaw's comedies
necessary to their mental furnishing, their understanding of
contemporary life, it is probable that all who would be drawn to
this book are already acquainted with the story of Mrs. Warren, and
will be interested in learning what happened after that story was
laid down by Mr. Shaw in 1897. I would in addition placate hostile
or peevish reviewers by reminding them of the continuity of human
histories; of biographies, real--though a little disguised by the
sauce of fiction--and unreal--because entitled _Life and Letters, by
His Widow_. The best novel or life-story ever written does not
commence with its opening page. The real commencement goes back to
the Stone ages or at any rate to the antecedent circumstances which
led up to the crisis or the formation of the characters portrayed.
Mr. Pickwick had a father, a grandfather; a mother in a mob-cap; in
the eighteenth century. It is permissible to speculate on their
stories and dispositions. Neither does a novel or a biography end
with the final page of its convenient instalment.

When you lay down the book which describes the pathetic failure of
Lord Randolph Churchill, you do so with curiosity as to what will
become of Winston. With a pre-knowledge of the Pickwick Club, one
may usefully employ the imagination in tracing out the possible
careers of Sam Weller's chubby little boys; grown into old men, and
themselves, perchance, leaving progeny that may have married into
the peerage from the Turf, or have entered the War Cabinet at the
beckoning of Mr. Lloyd George.

I know of descendants of Madame de Brinvilliers in England who have
helped to found the Y.W.C.A.; and collateral offshoots from the
Charlotte Corday stock who are sternly opposed to the assassination
of statesmen-journalists.

So, I have taken on myself the continuation of the story outlined
twenty-three years ago by Mr. Shaw in its late Victorian stage. _He_
had a prior claim to do so; just as he might have shown us the
life--but not the letters, for she was illiterate--of Catherine
Warren's mother, the frier of fish and letter of lodgings on Tower
Hill in the 'forties and 'fifties of the last century; and of the
young Lieutenant Warren of the Tower garrison who lodged and
cohabited with her at intervals between 1850 and 1854, when he went
out to the Crimea and there died of frost-bite and neglected wounds.
Mr. Shaw has waived such claims, having, as Vivie's grandmother
would have said, "other fish to fry." But for this I should not have
ventured to take up the tale, as I hold an author while he lives has
a prescriptive right to his creations. I shall feel no bitterness in
Nirvana if, after my death, another continues the story of Vivie or
of her friends and collateral relations, under circumstances which I
shall not live to see.

In justice to Mr. Shaw I should state that the present book is
entirely my own, and that though he has not renounced a polite
interest in Vivie he is in no way responsible for her career and
behaviour. He may even be annoyed at both.

                                             H. H. JOHNSTON.




        CONTENTS


CHAPTER
        PREFACE BY THE AUTHOR
      I VIVIE AND NORIE
     II HONORIA AND HER FRIENDS
    III DAVID VAVASOUR WILLIAMS
     IV PONTYSTRAD
      V READING FOR THE BAR
     VI THE ROSSITERS
    VII HONORIA AGAIN
   VIII THE BRITISH CHURCH
     IX DAVID IS CALLED TO THE BAR
      X THE SHILLITO CASE
     XI DAVID GOES ABROAD
    XII VIVIE RETURNS
   XIII THE SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT
    XIV MILITANCY
     XV IMPRISONMENT
    XVI BRUSSELS AND THE WAR: 1914
   XVII THE GERMANS IN BRUSSELS: 1915-1916
  XVIII THE BOMB IN PORTLAND PLACE
    XIX BERTIE ADAMS
     XX AFTER THE ARMISTICE
        L'ENVOI




MRS. WARREN'S DAUGHTER




CHAPTER I

VIVIE AND NORIE


The date when this story begins is a Saturday afternoon in June,
1900, about 3 p.m. The scene is the western room of a suite of
offices on the fifth floor of a house in Chancery Lane, the offices
of _Fraser and Warren_, Consultant Actuaries and Accountants. There
is a long window facing west, the central part of which is open,
affording a passage out on to a parapet. Through this window, and
still better from the parapet outside, may be seen the picturesque
spires and turrets of the Law Courts, a glimpse here and there of
the mellow, red-brick, white-windowed houses of New Square, the
tree-tops of Lincoln's Inn Fields, and the hint beyond a steepled
and chimneyed horizon of the wooded heights of Highgate. All this
outlook is flooded with the brilliant sunshine of June, scarcely
dimmed by the city smoke and fumes.

In the room itself there are on each of the tables vases of flowers
and a bunch of dark red roses on the top of the many pigeon-holed
bureau at which Vivien Warren is seated. The walls are mainly
covered with book-shelves well filled with consultative works on
many diverse subjects. There is another series of shelves crowded
with neat, green, tin boxes containing the papers of clients. A dark
green-and-purple portière partly conceals the entry into a washing
place which is further fitted with a gas stove for cooking and
cupboards for crockery and provisions. At the opposite end of the
room is a door which opens into a small bedroom. The fireplace in
the main room is fitted with the best and least smelly kind of gas
stove obtainable in 1900.

There are two square tables covered with piles of documents neatly
tied with green tape and ranged round the central vase of flowers; a
heavy, squat earthenware vase not easily knocked over; and there is
a second bureau with pigeon-holes and a roll top, similar to the one
at which Vivien Warren is seated. This is for the senior partner,
Honoria Fraser. Between the bureaus there is plenty of space for
access to the long west window and consequently to the parapet which
can be used like a balcony. Two small arm-chairs in green leather on
either side of the fireplace, two office chairs at the tables and a
revolving chair at each bureau complete the furniture of the
partners' room of _Fraser and Warren_ as you would have seen it
twenty years ago.

The rest of their offices consisted of a landing from which a lift
and a staircase descended, a waiting-room for clients, pleasantly
furnished, a room in which two female clerks worked, and off this a
small room tenanted by an office boy. You may also add in
imagination an excellent lavatory for the clerks, two telephones
(one in the partners' room), hidden safes, wall-maps; and you must
visualize everything as pleasing in colour--green, white, and
purple--flooded with light; clean, tidy, and admirably adapted for
business in the City.

Vivien Warren, as already mentioned, was, as the curtain goes up,
seated at her bureau, reading a letter. The letter was headed "Camp
Hospital, Colesberg, Cape Colony, May 2, 1900"; and ran thus:--

     DEAREST VIVIE,--

     Here I am still, but my leg is mending fast. The enteric was
     the worse trouble. That is over and done with, though I am
     the colour of a pig-skin saddle. My leg won't let me frisk
     just yet, but otherwise I feel as strong as a horse.

     When I was bowled over three months ago and the enteric got
     hold of me, on top of the bullet through my thigh, I lost my
     self-control and asked the people here to cable to you to
     come and nurse me. It was silly perhaps--the nursing here is
     quite efficient--and if any one was to have come out on my
     account it ought to have been the poor old mater, who wanted
     to very much. But somehow I could only think of _you_. I
     wanted you more than I'd ever done before. I hoped somehow
     your heart might be touched and you might come out and nurse
     me, and then out of pity marry me. Won't you do so? Owing to
     my stiff leg I dare say I shall be invalided out of the Army
     and get a small wound pension. And I've a project which will
     make lots of money--up in Rhodesia--a tip I've had from a
     man in the know. I'm going to take up some land near
     Salisbury. Ripping country and climate and all that. It
     would suit you down to the ground. You could put all that
     Warren business behind you, forget it all, drop the name,
     start a new career as Mrs. Frank Gardner, and find an
     eternally devoted husband in the man that signs this letter.

     I've been out here long enough to be up to all the ropes,
     and I'd already made a bit of money in Rhodesia before the
     war broke out and I got a commission. At any rate I've
     enough to start on as a married man, enough to give you a
     decent outfit and your passage out here and have a honeymoon
     before we start work on our future home. Darling Vivie! Do
     think about it. You'd never regret it. I'm a very different
     Frank to the silly ass you knew in the old Haslemere days.
     Now here's a five pound note to cover the cost of a full
     cable to say "yes," and when you'll be ready to start. When
     I get your answer--somehow I feel it'll _be_ "yes"--I'll
     send you a draft on a London bank to pay for a suitable
     trousseau and your passage from London to Cape Town, and _of
     course_ I'll come and meet you there, where we can be
     married. I shan't sleep properly till I get your "yes."

                         Your ever loving and always faithful
                                                 FRANK.

     P.S. There's a poor fellow here in the same ward dying--I
     should say--of necrosis of the jaw--Vavasour Williams is his
     name or a part of his name. His father was at Cambridge with
     my old man, and--isn't it rum?--he was a pupil of
     _Praddy's_!! He mucked his school and 'varsity career,
     thought next he'd like to be an architect or a scene
     painter. My dad recommended Praddy as a master. He worked in
     the Praed studio, but got the chuck over some foolery. Then
     as he couldn't face his poor old Governor, he enlisted in
     the Bechuanaland Border police, came out to South Africa and
     got let in for this show. The doctors and nurses give him
     about a month and he doesn't know it. He can't talk much
     owing to his jaw being tied up--usually he writes me
     messages, all about going home and being a good boy, turning
     over a new leaf, and so on. I suppose the last person you
     ever see nowadays is the Revd. Sam Gardner? You know they
     howked him out of Woodcote? He got "preferment" as he calls
     it, and a cure of souls at Margate. Rather rough on the dear
     old mater--bless her, _always_--She so liked the Hindhead
     country. But if you run up against Praddy you might let him
     know and he might get into touch with Vavasour Williams's
     people--twig?--F.G.

Vivie rose to her feet half-way through this letter and finished it
standing by the window.

She was tall--say, five feet eight; about twenty-five years of age;
with a well-developed, athletic figure, set off by a smart,
tailor-made gown of grey cloth. Yet although she might be called a
handsome woman she would easily have passed for a good-looking young
man of twenty, had she been wearing male costume.

Her brown-gold hair was disposed of with the least ostentation
possible and with no fluffiness. Her eyebrows were too well
furnished for femininity and nearly met when she frowned--a too
frequent practice, as was the belligerent look from her steely grey
eyes with their beautiful Irish setting of long dark lashes. She had
a straight nose and firm rounded chin, a rather determined look
about the mouth--lower lip too much drawn in as if from perpetual
self-repression. But all this severity disappeared when she smiled
and showed her faultless teeth. The complexion was clear though a
little tanned from deliberate exposure in athletics. Altogether a
woman that might have been described as "jolly good-looking," if it
had not been that whenever any man looked at her something hostile
and forbidding came into the countenance, and the eyebrows formed an
angry bar of hazel-brown above the dark-lashed eyes. But her "young
man" look won for her many a feminine friendship which she
impatiently repelled; for sentimentality disgusted her.

The door of the partners' room opened and in walked Honoria Fraser.
She was probably three years older than Vivie and likewise a
well-favoured woman, a little more matronly in appearance, somewhat
after the style of a married actress who really loves her husband
and has preserved her own looks wonderfully, though no one would
take her for less than twenty-eight.

At the sight of her, Vivie lost her frown and tossed the letter on
to the bureau.

Honoria Fraser had been lunching with friends in Portland Place.

_Honoria_: "What a swotter you are! I _thought_ I should find you
here. I suppose the staff departed punctually at One? I've come
back expressly from the Michael Rossiters to carry you off to
them--or rather to Kew. They're going to have tea with the
Thiselton-Dyers and then revel in azaleas and roses. I shall go out
and charter a hansom and we'll drive down ... it'll be some
compensation for your having worked extra hard whilst I've been
away....

"I met such a delightful man at the Rossiters'!" (slightly flushing)
"Don't look at me so reproachfully! There _are_ delightful men--a
few--in existence. This one has been wounded in South Africa and
he's so good-looking, though the back of his head is scarred and
he'll always walk with a limp.... Now then! Why do you look so
solemn? Put on your hat..."

_Vivie_: "I look solemn because I'm just considering a proposal of
marriage--or rather, the fewest words in which I can refuse it. I
don't think I want to go to Kew at all ... much sooner we had tea
together, here, on the roof..."

_Norie_: "I suppose it's Frank Gardner again, as I see his
handwriting on that envelope. Well I'm sorry about Kew--I should
have enjoyed it..."

_Vivie_ (bitterly): "I expect it's that 'delightful man' that
attracts you."

_Norie_: "Nonsense! I'm vowed to virginity, like you are ... I
really don't care if I never see Major Armstrong again ... though he
certainly _is_ rather a darling ... very good-looking ... and, d'you
know, he's almost a Pro-Boer, though the Boers ambushed him.... Says
this war's a beastly mistake....

"Well: I'll have tea here instead, if you like, and we can talk
business, which we haven't done for a fortnight. I must get out of
the way of paying visits in the country. They make one so
discontented with the City afterwards. I've had a feeling lately I
should like to have been a farmer.... Too much of the work of the
firm has been thrown on you.... But there's lots and lots I want to
talk over. I abandon Kew, willingly, and as to Major Armstrong....
However he can always find my address if he cares to..."

_Vivie_ (sits down in one of the arm chairs and Norie takes the
other): "Oh don't pity me. I love hard work and work which interests
me. And as to working for _you_, you know there's nothing I
wouldn't..."

_Norie_: "Oh stow that!... You've been a full-fledged partner for a
year and ought to be getting callous or suspicious ... I _did_ take
some money out of the petty cash yesterday. I must remember to put
it down. I took quite a lot ... for theatre tickets ... and you may
be suspecting Bertie Adams ... we can't call this an Adamless Eden,
can we? I wonder why we keep an office boy and not an office girl? I
suppose such things will soon be coming into being. We've women
clerks and typewriteresses ... Adams, I notice, is growing, and he
has the trace of a moustache and is already devoted to you ...
dog-like..."

_Vivie_: "He's still more devoted to cricket, fortunately; and as
soon as Rose and Lilian had gone he was off too.... Only, I fancy,
he discards Regent's Park now in favour of Hendon or Herne Hill..."

_Norie_: "Now, about Frank Gardner..."

_Vivie_: "Yes, that cablegram.... Let's frame it and send it off as
soon as we can; then get tea ready. Talking of tea: I was just
thinking before Frank's letter came how much good you'd done me--in
many other ways than setting me up in business."

_Norie_: "Shut up!..."

_Vivie_: "How, when we first worked together, I used to think it
necessary to imitate men by drinking an occasional whiskey and
soda--though I loathe spirits--and smoking a cigar--ugh!--And how
you drew me back to tea and a self-respecting womanliness--China
tea, of course, and cigarettes. Why _should_ we have wanted to be
like men?... much better to be the New Woman....

"As to Frank's cablegram..." (Goes to bureau, tries over several
drafts of message, consults Postal Guide as to cable rates _per_
word, and reads aloud) ... "How's this? 'Captain Frank Gardner Camp
Hospital Colesberg Cape Colony. Sorry must say no Best wishes
recovery writing. Vivie.' That'll cost just Two pounds and out of
the balance I shall buy a good parcel of books to send him, and some
strawberries and cakes for our tea." (Therewith she puts on hat
carefully--for she is always very particular, in a young-gentlemanly
way, about her appearance--goes out to send off cablegram from
Chancery Lane post-office, buy strawberries and cakes from Fleet
Street shops, and so back to the office by four o'clock. Meantime
Norie is reading through some of the recent correspondence on the
file.)

_Vivie_ (on her return): "Pouf! It _was_ hot in Fleet Street! I'm
sorry for poor Frankie, because he seems so to have set his heart on
marrying me. But I do hope he will take this answer as _final_."

_Norie_: "I suppose you are not refusing him for the same old
reason--that vague suggestion that he might be your half-brother?"

_Vivie_: "Oh _no_! Besides I pretty well know for a fact he isn't,
he simply couldn't be. I'm absolutely sure my father wasn't Sam
Gardner, any more than George Crofts was. I believe it was a young
Irish seminarist, some student for the priesthood whom my mother met
in Belgium the year before I was born. If I ever find out more I
will tell you. _You_ haven't seen 'Soapy Sam,' the Vicar of
Woodcote, or that beast, George Crofts; but if you _had_, you'd be
as sure as I am that neither of them was _my_ father--thank
goodness! As to Frank--yes--for a short time I _was_ fond of
him--till I learnt about my mother's 'profession.' It was rather a
silly sort of fondness. He was two years younger than I; I suppose
my feeling for him was half motherly ... I neither encouraged him
nor did I repel him. I think I was experimenting ... I rather wanted
to know what it felt like to be kissed by a man. Frank was a nice
creature, so far as a man can be. But all those horrid revelations
that broke up our summer stay at Haslemere four years ago--when I
ran away to you--gave me an utter disgust for marriage. And what a
life mine would have been if I had married him then; or after he
went out to South Africa! _Ghastly_! Want of money would have made
us hate one another and Frank would have been sure to become
patronizing. Because I was without a father in the legitimate way he
would have thought he was conferring a great honour on me by
marrying me, and would probably have expected me to drudge for him
while he idled his time away.... Oh, when I think what a life I have
led here, with you, full of interesting work and bright prospects,
free from money anxieties--dearest, dearest Norie--I can't thank you
enough. No, I'm not going to be sentimental--the New Woman is never
that. I'm going to get the tea ready; and after we've had tea on the
balcony we really must go into business matters. Your being away so
much the last fortnight, things have accumulated that I did not like
to decide for myself..."

_Norie_ (speaking rather louder as Vivie is now busy in the
adjoining roomlet, boiling the kettle on the gas stove and preparing
the tea): "Yes. And I've got _lots_ to talk over with you. All sorts
of plans have come into my head. I don't know whether I have been
eating anything more than usually brain stimulating--everything has
a physical basis--but I have come back from this scattered holiday
full of new ideas."

Presently they are seated on camp-stools sipping tea, eating
strawberries and cakes, under the striped sun-blind.

_Norie_ continues: "Do you remember Beryl Clarges at Newnham?"

_Vivie_: "Yes--the pretty girl--short, curly hair, brown eyes,
rather full lips, good at mathematics--hockey ... purposely shocked
you by her outspokenness--well?"

_Norie_: "Well, she's had a baby ... a month ago ... awful rumpus
with her people ... Father's Dean Clarges ... Norwich or Ely, I
forget which ... They've put her in a Nursing Home in Seymour
Street. Mother wears a lace mantilla and cries softly. Beryl went
wrong, as they call it, with an architect."

_Vivie_: "Pass your cup ... Don't take _all_ the strawberries
(_Norie_: "Sorry! Absence of mind--I've left you three fat ones")
Architect? Strange! I always thought all architects were like
Praddy--had no passions except for bricks and mortar and chiselled
stone and twirligig iron grilles ... perhaps just a thrill over a
nude statue. Why, till you told me this I'd as soon have trusted my
daughter--if I had one--with an architect as with a Colonel of
Engineers--You know! The kind that believes in the identity of the
Ten Lost Tribes with the British and is a True Protestant! Poor
Beryl! But how? what? when? why?"

_Norie_: "I think it began at Cambridge--the acquaintance did ...
Later, it developed into a passion. He had already one wife in
Sussex somewhere and four children. He took a flat for her in
Town--a studio--because Berry had given up mathematics and was going
in for sculpture; and there, whenever he could get away from
Storrington or some such place and from his City office, he used to
visit Beryl. This had been going on for three years. But last
February she had to break it to her mother that she was six months
gone. The other wife knows all about it but refuses to divorce the
naughty architect, and at the same time has cut off supplies--What
_cowards_ men are and how _little_ women stand by women! And then
it's a poor deanery and Beryl has five younger brothers that have
got to be educated. Her sculpture was little more than commissions
executed for her architect's building and I expect that resource
will now disappear ... I half think I shall bring her in here, when
she is well again. She's got a very good head-piece and you know we
are expanding our business ... She'd make a good House Agent ... She
writes sometimes for _Country Life_..."

_Vivie_: "Ye-es.... But you can't provide for many more of our
college-mates. Any more gone wrong?"

_Norie_: "It depends how you qualify 'wrong.' I really don't see
that it is 'wronger' for a young woman to yield to 'storgé' and have
a baby out of wedlock than for a man to engender that baby. Society
doesn't damn the man, unless he is a Cabinet Minister or a Cleric;
but it does its best to ruin the woman ... unless she's an actress
or a singer. If a woman likes to go through all the misery of
pregnancy and the pangs of delivery on her own account and without
being legally tied up with a man, why can't she? Beryl, at any rate,
is quite unashamed, and says she shall have as many children as her
earnings support ... that it will be great fun choosing their
sires--more variety in their types.... Is _she_ the New Woman, I
wonder?"

_Vivie_: "Well the whole thing bores me ... I suppose I am
embittered and disgusted. I'm sick of all this sexual nonsense....
Yes, after all, I approve of the marriage tie: it takes away the
romance of love, and it's that romance which is usually so
time-wasting and so dangerous. It conceals often a host of horrors
... But I'm a sort of neuter. All I want in life is hard work ... a
cause to fight for.... Revenge ... revenge on Man. God! How I hate
men; how I despise them! We can do anything they can if we train and
educate. I have taken to your business because it is one of the
crafty paths we can follow to creep into Man's fastnesses of the
Law, the Stock-Market, the Banks and Actuarial work..."

_Norie_: "My dear! You have quite a platform manner already. I
predict you will soon be addressing audiences of rebellious
women.... But I am more the Booker Washington of my sex. I want
women to work--even at quite humble things--before they insist on
equal rights with man. At any rate I want to help them to make an
honest livelihood without depending on some one man.... Business
seems to be good, eh? If the first half of this year is equalled by
the second, I should think there would be a profit to be divided of
quite a thousand pounds?"

_Vivie_: "Quite. Of course we are regular pirates. None of the
actuarial or accountancy corporations will admit women, so we can't
pass exams and call ourselves chartered actuaries or incorporated
accountants. But if women clients choose to consult us there is no
law to prevent them, or to make our giving advice illegal. So we
advise and estimate and do accounts and calculate probabilities.
Then although we can't call ourselves Solicitors we can--or at any
rate we do--give legal advice. We can't figure on the Stock
Exchange, but we can advise clients about their investments and buy
and sell stock and real estate (By the bye I want you to give me
your opinion on the tithe question, the liability on that Kent fruit
farm). We are consulted on contracts ... I'm going to start a women
authors' branch, and perhaps a tourist agency. Some day we will have
a women's publishing business, we'll set up a women's printing
press, a paper mill.... Of course as you know I am working hard on
law ... not only to understand men's roguery in every direction, but
so that if necessary I can add pleading in the courts to some other
woman's solicitor work. That's going to be my first struggle with
Man: to claim admittance to the Bar.... If we can once breach that
rampart the Vote must inevitably follow. Oh _how_ we have been dumb
before our shearers! The rottenness of Man's law.... The perjury,
corruption, waste of time, special pleading that go on in our male
courts of _in_justice, the verdicts of male juries!"

_Norie_: "Just so. But can't you find a little time to be social?
Why be so morose? For instance, why not come and be introduced to
Michael Rossiter? He's a dear--amazingly clever--a kind of
prophet--Your one confidant, Stead, thinks a lot of him."

_Vivie_: "_Dear_ Norie--I can't. I swore two years ago I would drop
Society and run no risk of being found out as 'Mrs. Warren's
daughter.' That beast George Crofts revenged himself because I
wouldn't marry him by letting it be known here and there that I
_was_ the daughter of the 'notorious Mrs. Warren'; whereupon several
of the people I liked--you remember?--dropped me--the Burne-Joneses,
the Lacrevys. Or if it wasn't Crofts some other swine did. But for
the fact that it would upset our style as a firm I could change my
name: call myself something quite different....

"D'you know, I've sometimes thought I'd cut my hair short and dress
in men's clothes, and go out into the world as a man ... my voice is
almost a tenor--_Such_ a lark! I'd get admitted to the Bar. But the
nuisance about that would be the references. I'm an outlaw, you see,
through no fault of mine.... I couldn't give _you_ as a reference,
and I don't know any man who would be generous enough to take the
risk of participating in the fraud.... unless it were Praed--good
old Praddy. I'm sure it's been done now and again. They call Judge
FitzSimmons 'an old woman.' Well, d'you know, I believe he _is_ ...
a wise old woman."

_Norie_: "Well: bide a wee, till our firm is doing a roaring
business: I can pretend then to take in a male partner, p'raps.
Rose and Lilian are very hard-working and we can't afford to lose
them yet. If you appeared one morning dressed as a young man they
might throw up their jobs and go elsewhere..."

_Vivie_: "You may be quite sure I won't let _you_ down. Moreover I
haven't the money for any vagaries yet, though I have an instinct
that it is coming. You know those Charles Davis shares I bought at
5_s._ 3_d._? Well, they rose to 29_s._ whilst you were away; so I
sold out. We had three hundred, and that, less commissions, made
about £350 profit; the boldest coup we have had yet. And all because
I spotted that new find of emery powder in Tripoli, saw it in a
Consular Report....

"I want to be rich and therefore powerful, Norie! Then people will
forget fast enough about my shameful parentage."

_Norie_: "How _is_ she? Do you ever hear from or of her now?"

_Vivie_: "I haven't heard _from_ her for two years, since I left her
letters unanswered. But I hear _of_ her every now and again. No. Not
through Crofts. I suppose you know--if you take any interest in that
wretch--that since he married the American quakeress he took his
name off the _Warren Hotels Company_ and sold out much of his
interest. He is now living in great respectability, breeding race
horses. They even say he has given up whiskey. He has got a son and
has endowed six cots in a Children's hospital. No. I think it must
be _mother_ who has notices posted to me, probably through that
scoundrel, Bax Strangeways ... generally in the _London Argus_ and
the _Vie-de-Paris_--cracking up the Warren Hotels in Brussels,
Berlin, Buda-Pest and Roquebrune. _What_ a comedy!...

"There's my Aunt Liz at Winchester--Mrs. Canon Burstall--won't know
me--I'm too compromising. But I'm sure her money-bags have been
filled at one time--perhaps are still--out of the profits on
mother's 'Hotels.'..."

_Norie_: "I didn't remember your aunt was married ... or rather I
suppose I did, but thought she was a widow, real or _soi-disant_..."

_Vivie_: "So she is, after four years of happy married life! My
'uncle' Canon Burstall--Oh what a screaming joke the whole thing
is!... I doubt if he was aware he had a niece.... Don't you remember
he was killed in the Alps last autumn?..."

_Norie_: "I remember your going down to see your aunt after you
broke off relations with your mother in--in--1897...?"

_Vivie_: "Yes. I wanted to see how the land lay and not judge any
one unfairly. Besides I--I--didn't like being dependent entirely on
you--at that time--for support: and Praed was in Italy. I knew that
Aunt Liz, like mother, was illegitimate--and guessed she had once
made her living in the higher walks of prostitution--she was a
stockbroker's mistress at one time--. But she had married and
settled down at Winchester ... She met her Canon--the Alpine
traveller ... in Switzerland. I felt if she took no money from
mother's 'houses,' I could perhaps make a home with her, or at any
rate have _some_ kith and kin to go to. She had no children....
But--I must have told you all this years ago?--she almost pushed me
out of her house for fear I should stay till the Canon came in from
the afternoon service; denied everything; threatened me as though I
was a blackmailer; almost looked as if she could have killed me and
buried me in the garden of the Canonry....

"I've examined the business of the _Warren Hotels Ltd._ since then,
but it's a private company, and all its doings are so cleverly
concealed.... Aunt Liz doesn't figure amongst the shareholders any
more than Crofts does. That horrid Bax holds most of the shares now,
and mother the rest.... Yet Aunt Liz must be rich and she certainly
didn't get it from the Canon, who only left a net personality of
under £4,000.... I read his will at Somerset House.... She has had
her portrait in the _Queen_ because she gave a large subscription to
the underpinning of Winchester Cathedral and the restoration of
Wolvesey as a clergy house.... Mother must be very rich, I should
judge, from certain indications. I expect _she_ will retire from the
'Hotels,' some day, wipe out the past, and buy a new present with
her money.... She'll have _her_ portrait in the _Queen_ some day as
a Vice-President of the Girls' Friendly Society!... And yet she's
such a gambler and a rake that she _may_ get pinched over the White
Slave traffic.... I was on tenterhooks over that Lewissohn case the
other day, fearing every moment to see mother's name mixed up with
it, or else an allusion to her 'Hotels.' But I fancy she has been
wise enough--indeed I should guess that Aunt Liz had long ago warned
her to leave England alone as a recruiting ground and to collect her
chambermaids, waitresses, musicians, typists from the Continent
only--Austria, Alsace, Bohemia, Belgium, Italy, the Rhineland,
Paris, Russia, Poland. Knowing what we British people are, can't you
almost predict the _bias_ of Aunt Liz's mind? How she would solace
herself that her dividends were not derived from the prostitution of
English girls but only of 'foreigners'?..."

_Norie_: "You seem to have studied the geography of the business
pretty thoroughly!..."

_Vivie_ (bitterly): "Yes. I have talked it over with Stead from time
to time. I believe he has only spared mother and the Warren Hotels
out of consideration for me ... He wants me to change my surname and
give myself a chance..."

_Norie_: "I see" (pausing). "Of course it is rather an idea, as you
refuse to disguise yourself by marriage. You'd change your name and
then listen with equanimity to fulminations against the Warren
Hotels. But there would be an awkwardness in the firm. We oughtn't
to change our title just as we are getting a good clientèle.... I
must think ... If only we could pretend you'd been left some
property--but that sort of lie is soon found out!--and had to change
your name to--to--to. Oh well, we could soon think of some name
beginning with a W--Walters, Waddilove--Waddilove is a delicious
name in cold weather, suggesting cotton-wool or a warm duvet--or
Wilson--or Wilberforce. But I'm afraid the staff--Rose Mullet and
Lily Steynes and the amorous Bertie Adams--would think it odd, put
two and two together, and guess right. Warren, after all, is such a
common name. And we've got so used to our three helpers, we could
hardly turn them off, and take on new people whom perhaps we
couldn't trust.... We must think it over....

"Now I must go back to Queen Anne's Mansions and sit a little while
with Mummy. Come and dine with us? There'll only be us three ... no
horrid man to fall in love with you.... You needn't put on a low
dress ... and we'll go to the dress circle at some play afterwards."

_Vivie_: "But those papers on my desk? I must have your opinion for
or against..."

_Norie_: "All right. It's half-past five. I'll give them half an
hour's study whilst you wash up the tea things and titivate. Then
we'll take a hansom to Quansions: the Underground is so grimy."




CHAPTER II

HONORIA AND HER FRIENDS


The story of Honoria Fraser was something like this: partly
guesswork, I admit. Although I know her well I can only put her past
together by deductions based on a few admitted facts, one or two
letters and occasional unfinished sentences, interrupted by
people coming in. Is it not _always_ thus with our friends and
acquaintances? I long to know all about them from their birth
(including date and place of birth and parentage) onwards; what the
father's profession was and why on earth he married the mother
(after I saw the daguerreotype portrait), and how they became
possessed of so much money, and why she went back to live with _her_
mother between the birth of her second child and the near advent of
her third. But in how very few cases do we know their whole story,
do we even care to know more than is sufficient for our purpose in
issuing or accepting invitations? There are the Dombeys--the Gorings
as they're now called, who live near us. I've seen the tombstone of
Lucilla Smith in Goring churchyard, but I don't know _for a fact_
that Lord Goring was the father of Lucilla's son (who was killed in
the war). I guess he was, from this and that, from what Mrs. Legg
told me, and what I overheard at the Sterns'. If he wasn't, then he
has only himself to thank for the wrong assumption: I mean, from his
goings-on.

Then again, the Clementses, who live at the Grange. I feel
instinctively they are _nice_ people, but I haven't the least idea
who _she_ was and how _he_ made his money, though from his acreage
and his motors I am entitled to assume he has a large income. She
seems to know a lot about Spain; but I don't feel encouraged to ask
her: "Was your father in the wine trade? Is _that_ why you know
Xeres so well?" Clements himself has in his study an enlarged
photograph of a handsome woman with a kind of mourning wreath round
the frame--beautifully carved. Is it the portrait of a former wife?
Or of a sister who committed suicide? Or was it merely bought in
Venice for the sake of the carving? Perhaps I shall know some
day--if it matters. In a moment of expansion during the Railway
Strike, Mrs. Clements will say: "_That_ was poor Walter's first. She
died of acute dyspepsia, poor thing, on their marriage tour, and was
buried at Venice. Don't ever allude to it because he feels it so
dreadfully." And my curiosity will have been rewarded for its long
and patient restraint. Clements' little finger on his left hand is
mutilated. I have never asked why--a lawn-mowing machine? Or a bite
from some passionate mistress in a buried past? I note silently that
he disapproves of palmistry--

But about Honoria Fraser, to whom I was introduced by Mr. George
Bernard Shaw twenty years ago: She was born in 1872, as _Who's Who_
will tell you; also that she was the daughter and eldest child of a
famous physician (Sir Meldrum Fraser) who wrought some marvellous
cures in the 'sixties, 'seventies and 'eighties, chiefly by dieting
and psycho-therapy. (He got his knighthood in the first jubilee year
for reducing to reasonable proportions the figure of good-hearted,
thoroughly kindly, and much loved Princess Mary of Oxford.)
He--Honoria's father--was married to a beautiful woman, a relation
of Bessie Rayner Parkes, with inherited advanced views on the Rights
and Position of Woman. Lady Fraser was, indeed, an early type of
Suffragist and also wrote some poetry which was far from bad. They
had two children: Honoria, born, as I say, in 1872; and John (John
Stuart Mill Fraser was his full name--too great a burden to be
borne) four years later than Honoria, who was devoted to him,
idolized him, as did his mother and father. Honoria went to Bedford
College and Newnham; John to one of the two most famous of our
public schools (I need not be more precise), with Cambridge in view
afterwards.

But in the case of John a tragedy occurred. He had risen to be head
of the school; statesmen with little affectation applauded him on
speech days. He had been brilliant as a batsman, was a champion
swimmer, and _facile princeps_ in the ineptitudes of the classics;
and showed a dazzling originality in other studies scarcely within
the school curriculum. Further he was growing out of boy gawkiness
into a handsome youth of an Apolline mould, when, on the morning of
his eighteenth birthday, he was found dead in his bed, with a bottle
of cyanide of potassium on the bed-table to explain why.

All else was wrapt in mystery ... at any rate it was a mystery I
have no wish to lay bare. The death and the inquest verdict,
"Suicide while of unsound mind, due to overstudy," broke his
father's heart and his mother's: in the metaphorical meaning of
course, because the heart is an unemotional pump and it is the brain
and the nerve centres that suffer from our emotions. Sir Meldrum
Fraser died a year after his son. He left a fortune of eighty
thousand pounds. Half of this went at once to Honoria and the other
half to the life-use of Lady Fraser with a reversion to her
daughter.

Honoria after her father's death left Cambridge and moved her mother
from Harley Street to Queen Anne's Mansions so that with her
shattered nerves and loss of interest in life she might have no
household worries, or at any rate nothing worse than remonstrating
with the still-room maids on the twice-boiled water brought in for
the making of tea; or with the culinary department over the
monotonous character of the savouries or the tepid ice creams which
dissolved so rapidly into fruit-juice when they were served after a
house-dinner.[1] Honoria herself, mistress of a clear two thousand
pounds a year, and more in prospect, carried out plans formed while
still at Newnham after her brother's death. She, like Vivien Warren,
her three-years-younger friend and college-mate, was a great
mathematician--a thing I never could be and a status I am incapable
of understanding; consequently one I view at first with the deepest
respect. I am quite astonished when I meet a male or female
mathematician and find they require food as I do, are less quick at
adding up bridge scores, lose rather than win at Goodwood, and write
down the "down" train instead of the "up" in their memorabilia. But
there it is. They have only to apply sines and co-sines, tangents
and logarithms to a stock exchange quotation for me to grovel before
their superior wisdom and consult them at every turn in life.

  [Footnote 1: This, of course, was twenty, years ago.--H.H.J.]

Honoria had resolved to turn her great acquirements in Algebra and
the Higher Mathematics to practical purposes. Being the ignoramus
that I am--in this direction--I cannot say how it was to be done;
but both she and Vivie had grasped the possibilities which lay
before exceptionally well-educated women on the Stock Exchange, in
the Provision markets, in the Law, in Insurance calculations, and
generally in steering other and weaker women through the
difficulties and pitfalls of our age; when in nine cases out of
thirteen (Honoria worked out the ratio) women of large or moderate
means have only dishonest male proficients to guide them.

Moreover Honoria's purpose was two-fold. She wished to help women in
their business affairs, but she also wanted to find careers for
women. She, like Vivien Warren, was a nascent suffragist--perhaps a
born suffragist, a reasoned one; because the ferment had been in her
mother, and her grandmother was a friend of Lydia Becker and a
cousin of Mrs. Belloc. John's death had been a horrible numbing
shock to Honoria, and she felt hardly in her right mind for three
months afterwards. Then on reflection it left some tarnish on her
family, even if the memory of the dear dead boy, the too brilliant
boy, softened from the poignancy of utter disappointment into a
tender sorrow and an infinite pity and forgiveness.

But the tragedy turned her thoughts from marriage to some mission of
well-doing. She determined to devote that proportion of her
inheritance which would have been John's share to this end: the
liberation and redemption of women.

She was no "anti-man," like Vivie. She liked men, if truth were
told, a tiny wee bit more than women. But she wished in the moods
that followed her brother's death in 1894 to be a mother by
adoption, a refuge for the fallen, the bewildered, the unstrung. She
helped young men back into the path of respectability and
wage-earning as well as young women. She was even, when opportunity
offered, a matchmaker.

Being heiress eventually to £4,000 a year (a large income in pre-war
days) and of attractive appearance, she had no lack of suitors, even
though she thought modern dancing inane, and had little skill at
ball-games. I have indicated her appearance by some few phrases
already; but to enable you to visualize her more definitely I might
be more precise. She was a tall woman rather than large built, like
the young Juno when first wooed by Jove. Where she departed from the
Junonian type she turned towards Venus rather than Minerva; in spite
of being a mathematician. You meet with her sisters in physical
beauty among the Americans of Pennsylvania, where, to a stock mainly
Anglo-Saxon, is added a delicious strain of Gallic race; or you see
her again among the Cape Dutch women who have had French Huguenot
great grandparents. It is perhaps rather impertinent continuing
this analysis of her charm, seeing that she lives and flourishes
more than ever, twenty years after the opening of my story; not very
different in outward appearance at 48, as Lady Armstrong--for of
course, as you guess already, she married Major--afterwards Sir
Petworth--Armstrong--than she was at twenty-eight, the partner,
friend and helper of Vivien Warren.

Being in comfortable circumstances, highly educated, handsome,
attractive, with a mezzo-soprano voice of rare beauty and great
skill as a piano-forte accompanyist, she had not only suitors who
took her rejection without bitterness, but hosts of friends. She
knew all the nice London people of her day: Lady Feenix, who in some
ways resembled her, Diana Dombey, who did not _quite_ approve of
her, being a little uncertain yet about welcoming the New Woman, all
the Ritchies, married and unmarried, Lady Brownlow, the Duchess of
Bedford (Adeline), the Michael Fosters, most of the Stracheys (she
liked the ones I liked), the Hubert Parrys, the Ripons (how she
admired Lady Ripon, as who did not!), Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton, Miss
Lena Ashwell, the Bernard Shaws, the Wilfred Meynells, the H.G.
Wellses, the Sidney Webbs; and--leaving uninstanced a number of
other delightful, warm-blooded, pleasant-voiced, natural-mannered
people--the Rossiters.

Or at least, Michael Rossiter. For although you could tolerate for
his sake Mrs. Rossiter, and even find her a source of quiet
amusement, you could hardly say you liked her--not in the way you
could say it of most of the men and women I have specified. Michael
Rossiter, who comes into this story, ought really if there were a
discriminating wide-awake, up-to-date Providence--which there is
not--to have met Honoria when she was twenty. (At nineteen such a
woman is still immature; and moreover until she was twenty, Honoria
had not mastered the Binomial Theorem.) Had he married her at that
period he would himself have been about twenty-seven which is quite
soon enough for a great man of science to marry and procreate
geniuses. But as a matter of fact, when he came down to Cambridge
in--? 1892--to deliver a course of Vacation lectures on embryology,
he was already two years married to Linda Bennet, an heiress, the
daughter and niece (her parents died when she was young and she
lived with an uncle and aunt) of very rich manufacturers at Leeds.

So, though his eye, quick to discern beauty, and his brain tentacles
ready to detect intelligence combined with a lovely nature, soon
singled out Honoria Fraser, amongst a host of less attractive
girl-graduates, he had no more thought of falling in love with her
than with a princess of the blood-royal. He might, long since,
within a month of his marriage have found out his Linda to be a
pretty little simpleton with a brain incapable of taking in any more
than it had learnt at a Scarborough finishing school; but he was too
instinctive a gentleman to indulge in any flirtation, any deviation
whatever from mental or physical monogamy. For he remembered always
that it was his wife's money which had enabled him to pursue his
great researches without the heart-breaking delays, limitations and
insufficiencies involved in Government or Royal Society grants; and
that Linda had not only endowed him with all her worldly goods--all
but those he had insisted in putting into settlement--but that she
had given him all her heart and confidence as well.

Still, he liked Honoria. She was eager to learn much else beyond the
hard-grained muses of the square and cube; she was the daughter of a
prosperous and boldly experimental physician, whose wife was a
champion of women's rights. So he pressed Honoria to come with her
mother and make the acquaintance of himself and Linda in Portland
Place.

Why was Michael Rossiter wedded to Linda Bennet when he was no more
than twenty-five, and she just past her coming of age? Because fresh
from Edinburgh and Cambridge and with a reputation for unusual
intuition in Biology and Chemistry he had come to be Science master
at a great College in the North, and thus meeting Linda at the
Philosophical Institute of Leeds had caused her to fall in love with
him whilst he lectured on the Cainozoic fauna of Yorkshire. He was
himself a Northumbrian of borderland stock: something of the Dane
and Angle, the Pict and Briton with a dash of the Gypsy folk: a
blend which makes the Northumbrian people so much more productive of
manly beauty, intellectual vivacity, bold originality than the
slow-witted, bulky, crafty Saxons of Yorkshire or the under-sized,
rugged-featured Britons of Lancashire.

Linda fell in love all in one evening with his fiery eyes, black
beard, the Northumbrian burr of his pronunciation, and the daring of
his utterances, though she could scarcely grasp one of his
hypotheses. Her uncle and aunt being narrowly pietistic she was
bored to death with the Old Testament, and Rossiter's scarcely
concealed contempt for the Mosaic story of creation captured her
intellect; while the physical attraction she felt was that which the
tall, handsome, resolute brunet has for the blue-eyed fluffy little
blonde. She openly made love to him over the tea and coffee served
at the "soirée" which followed the lecture. Her slow-witted guardian
had no objection to offer; and there were not wanting go-betweens to
urge on Rossiter with stories of her wealth and the expanding value
of her financial interests. He wanted to marry; he was touched by
her ill-concealed passion, found her pretty and appealingly
childlike. So, after a short wooing, he married her and her five
thousand pounds a year, and settled down in Park Crescent, Portland
Place, so as to be near the Zoo and Tudell's dissecting rooms, to
have the Royal Botanic gardens within three minutes' walk, and the
opportunity of turning a large studio in the rear of his house into
a well-equipped chemical and dissecting laboratory. One of his close
pursuits at that time was the analysis of the Thyroid gland and its
functions, its over or under development in British statesmen,
dramatic authors and East End immigrants.




CHAPTER III

DAVID VAVASOUR WILLIAMS


It is in the spring of 1901. A fine warm evening, but at eight
o'clock the dusk is already on the verge of darkness as Honoria
emerges from the lift at her Chancery Lane Office (near the corner
of Carey Street), puts her latch-key into the door of the partners'
room, and finds herself confronting the silhouette of a young man
against the western glow of the big window.

_Norie_ (inwardly rather frightened): "Hullo! Who are _you_ and what
are you doing here?"

_Vivie_ (mimicking a considerate, cringing burglar): "Sorry to
startle you, lidy, but I don't mean no 'arm. I'll go quiet. Me
name's D.V. Williams..."

_Norie_: "You absurd creature! But you shouldn't play such pranks on
these respectable premises. You gave me a _horrid_ start, and I
realized for the first time that I've got a heart. I really must sit
down and pant."

_Vivie_: "I am sorry, dearest. I had not the slightest notion
you would be letting yourself into the office at this hour--8
o'clock--and I was just returning from my crammers..."

_Norie_: "I came for those Cranston papers. Mother is ill. I may
have to sit up with her after Violet Hunt goes, so I thought I would
come here, fetch the bundle of papers and plans, and go through them
in the silent watches of the night, _if_ mother sleeps. But do you
mean to say you have already started this masquerade?"

_Vivie_: "I do. You see Christabel Pankhurst has been turned down
as a barrister. They won't let her qualify for the Bar, because
she's a woman, so they certainly won't let _me_ with my pedigree;
just as, merely because we are women, they won't let us become
Chartered Actuaries or Incorporated Accountants. After we had that
long talk last June I got a set of men's clothes together, a regular
man's outfit. The suit doesn't fit over well but I am rectifying
that by degrees. I went to a general outfitter in Cornhill and told
a cock-and-bull story--as it was an affair of ready cash they didn't
stop to question me about it. I said something about a sea-faring
brother, just my height, a trifle stouter in build--lost all his kit
at sea--been in hospital--now in convalescent home--how I wanted to
save him all the fatigue possible--wouldn't want more than
reach-me-downs at present, etc., etc. They rather flummoxed me at
first by offering a merchant service uniform, but somehow I got over
that, though this serge suit has rather a sea-faring cut. I got so
unnecessarily explanatory with the shopman that he began to pay me
compliments, said my brother must be a good-looking young chap if he
was at all like me. However, I got away with the things in a cab,
and told the cab to drive to St. Paul's station, and on the way
re-directed him here.

"Last autumn I began practising at night-time after all our
familiars had left these premises. Purposely I did not tell you
because I feared your greater caution and instinctive respectability
might discourage me. Otherwise, nobody's spotted me, so far. I'd
intended breaking it to you any day now, because I've gone too far
to draw back, for weal or woe. But either we have been rushed with
business, or you've been anxious about Lady Fraser--How is she?"
(Norie interpolates "Very poorly.") "So truly sorry!--I was
generally just about to tell you when Rose or Lilian--tiresome
things!--would begin most assiduously passing in and out with
papers. Even now I mustn't keep you, with your mother so ill..."

_Norie_ (looking at her wrist-watch): "Violet has very kindly
promised to stay with mother till ten.... I can give you an hour,
though I must take a few minutes off that for the firm's business as
I haven't been here much for three days..." (They talk business for
twenty minutes, during which Norie says: "It's really _rather_ odd,
how those clothes change you! I feel vaguely compromised with a
handsome young man bending over me, his cheek almost touching
mine!"--and Vivie retorts "Oh, _don't_ be an ass!")

_Norie_: "So you really _are_ going to take the plunge?"

_Vivie_: "I really _am_. As soon as it suits your convenience, Vivie
Warren will retire from your firm and go abroad. You must either
replace her by Beryl Clarges or allow Mr. Vavasour Williams"
(Honoria interpolates: "_Ridiculous_ name! How did you think of
it?") "to come and assist in the day-time or after office hours. You
can say to the winds that he is Vivie's first cousin, remarkably
like her in some respects.... Rose Mullet is engaged to be married
and is only--she told me yesterday with many blushes--staying on to
oblige us. Lilian Steynes said the other day that if we were making
any changes in the office, much as she liked her work here, her
mother having died she thought it was her duty to go and live with
her maternal aunt in the country. The aunt thinks she can get her a
post as a brewery clerk at Aylesbury, and she is longing to breed
Aylesbury ducks in her spare time.--There is Bertie Adams, it's
true. There's something so staunch about him and he is so useful
that he and Praed and Stead are the three exceptions I make in my
general hatred of mankind..."

_Norie_: "He will be very much cut up at your going--or seeming to
go."

_Vivie_: "Just so. I think I shall write him a farewell note,
saying it's only for a time: I mean, that I may return later
on--dormant partnership--nothing really changed, don't you know? But
that as Rose and Lilian are going, Mrs.--what does she call herself,
Claridge?"--(Norie interpolates: "Yes, that was her idea: she
doesn't want to blazon the name of Clarges as the symbol of Free
Love, 'cos of the dear old Dean; yet Claridge will not be too much
of a surrender and is sure to invoke respectability, because of the
Hotel")--"Mrs. Claridge, then, is coming in my stead--He's to help
her all he can--and my cousin, who is reading for the Bar, will also
look in when you are very busy. I shall, of course, see about
rooms in one of the Inns of Court--the Temple perhaps. I have
been stealthily watching Fig Tree Court. I _think_ I can get
chambers there--a man is turning out next month--got a Colonial
appointment--I've put my new name down at the lodge and I shall have
to rack my brains for references--you will do for one--or perhaps
not--however that I can work out later. Of course I won't take the
final plunge till I have secured the rooms. Meantime I will use my
bedroom here but promise you I will be awfully prudent..."

_Norie_: "I couldn't possibly have Beryl 'living in,' with a child
hanging about the place; so I think if you _do_ go I shall turn your
bedroom into an apartment which Beryl and I can use for toilet
purposes but where we can range out on book-shelves a whole lot of
our books. Just now they are most inconveniently stored away in
boxes. It's rather tiresome about Beryl. I believe she's going to
have _another_ child. At any rate she says it may be four months
before she can come to work here regularly. I asked her about it the
other day, because if mother gets worse I may be hindered about
coming to the office, and I didn't want you to get overworked,--so I
said to Beryl.... That reminds me, she referred to the coming child
and added that its father was a policeman. Quite a nice creature in
his private life. Of course she's only kidding. I expect it's the
architect all the time. You know how she delighted in shocking us at
Newnham. I wish she hadn't this kink about her. P'raps I'm getting
old-fashioned already--You used to call me 'the Girondist.' But if
the New Woman _is_ to go on the loose and be unmoral like the
rabbits, won't the cause suffer from middle-class opposition?"

_Vivie_: "Perhaps. But it may gain instead the sympathies of the
lower and the upper classes. Why do you bother about Beryl? I agree
with you in disliking all this sexuality..."

_Norie_: "Does one _ever_ quite know why one likes people? There is
_something_ about Beryl that gets over me; and she _is_ a worker.
You know how she grappled with that Norfolk estate business?"

_Vivie_: "Well, it's fortunate she and I have not met since Newnham
days. You must tip her the story that I am going away for a
time--abroad--and that a young--young, because I look a mere boy,
dressed up in men's clothes--a young cousin of mine, learned in the
law, is going to drop in occasionally and do some of the work..."

_Norie_: "I'm afraid I'm rather weak-willed. I _ought_ to stop this
prank before it has gone too far, just as I ought to discourage
Beryl's babies. Your schemes sound so stagey. Off the stage
you never take people in with such flimsy stories and weak
disguises--you'll tie yourself up into knots and finally get sent to
prison.... However.... I can't help being rather tickled by your
idea. It's vilely unjust, men closing two-thirds of the respectable
careers to women, to bachelor women above all..." (A pause, and the
two women look out on a blue London dotted with lemon-coloured,
straw-coloured, mauve-tinted lights, with one cold white radiance
hanging over the invisible Piccadilly Circus)--"Well, go ahead!
Follow your star! I can be confident of one thing, you won't do
anything mean or disgraceful. Deceiving Man while his vile laws and
restrictions remain in force is no crime. Be prudent, so far as
compromising our poor little firm here is concerned, because if you
bring down my grey hairs with sorrow to the grave we shall lose a
valuable source of income. Besides: any public scandal just now in
which I was mixed up might kill my mother. Want any money?"

_Vivie_: "You generous darling! _Never, never_ shall I forget your
kindness and your trust in me. You have at any rate saved one soul
alive." (Honoria deprecates gratitude.) "No, I don't want
money--yet. You made me take and bank £700 last January over that
Rio de Palmas coup--heaps more than my share. Altogether I've got
about £1,000 on deposit at the C. and C. bank, the Temple Bar
branch. I've many gruesome faults, but I _am_ thrifty. I think I can
win through to the Bar on that. Of course, if afterwards briefs
don't come in--"

_Norie_: "Well, there'll always be the partnership which will go on
unaltered. I shall pretend you are only away for a time and your
share shall be regularly paid in to your bank. Of course I shall
meet Mr. Vavasour Williams now and again and I can tell him things
and consult with him. If we think Beryl, after she is installed here
as head clerk--of course I shan't make her a partner for _years_ and
_years_--not at all if she remains flighty--if we think she is
unsuspicious, and Bertie Adams likewise, and the new clerks and the
housekeeper and her husband, there is no reason why you should not
come here fairly often and put in as much work as you can on our
business."

_Vivie_: "Yes. Of course I must be careful of one predicament. I
have studied the regulations about being admitted to the English
Bar. They are very quaint and medieval or early Georgian. You
mayn't be a Chartered Accountant or Actuary--the Lord alone knows
why! I suppose some Lord Chancellor was done in the eye in
Elizabeth's reign by an actuary and laid down that law. Equally you
mayn't be a clergyman. As to that we needn't distress ourselves.
It's rather piteous about the prohibiting Accountants, because as
women we are not allowed to qualify in _any_ capacity as Accountants
or Actuaries; and work here is only permissible by our not
pretending to belong to any recognized body like the Institute of
Actuaries. So that in coming to work for you I must not seem to be
in any way doing the business of Accountants or Actuaries. Indeed it
might be awkward for my scheme if I was too openly associated with
Fraser and Warren.

"I already think of myself as Williams--I shall pose of course as a
Welshman. My appearance _is_ rather Welsh, don't you think? It's the
Irish blood that makes me look Keltic--I'm sure my father was an
Irish student for the priesthood at Louvain, and certain scraps of
information I got out of mother make me believe that _her_ mother
was a pretty Welsh girl from Cardiff, brought over to London Town by
some ship's captain and stranded there, on Tower Hill.

"However, I have still the whole scheme to work out and when I'm
ready to start on it--which will be very soon--I'll let you know.
Now, though I'd love to discuss all the other details, I mustn't
forget your mother will be wanting you--I wish _I_ had a mother to
tend--I wonder" (wistfully) "whether I was too hard on mine?

"D'you mind posting these letters as you go out? I shall change back
to Vivie Warren in a dressing gown, give myself a light supper, and
then put in two hours studying Latin and Norman French. Good night,
dearest!"

Two months after this conversation Vivie decided to pay a call on
an old friend of her mother's, Lewis Maitland Praed, if you want his
full name, a well-known architect, and one of the few male friends
of Catherine Warren who had not also been her lover. Why, he never
quite knew himself. When he first met her she was the boon
companion, the mistress--more or less, and unattached--of a young
barrister, a college friend of Praed's. Kate Warren at that time
called herself Kitty Vavasour; and on the strength of having done a
turn or two on the music halls considered herself an actress with a
right to a professional name. It was in this guise that the "Revd."
Samuel Gardner met her and had that six months' infatuation for her
which afterwards caused him so much disquietude; though it preceded
the taking of his ordination vows by quite a year, and his marriage
to his wife--much too good for him--in 1874. [The Revd. Sam, you may
remember, was the father of the scapegrace Frank who nearly captured
Vivie's young affections and had written from South Africa proposing
marriage at the opening of this story.]

Kate Vavasour in 1872 was an exceedingly pretty girl of nineteen or
twenty; showily dressed, and quick with her tongue. She was
good-natured and jolly, and though Praed himself was the essence of
refinement there was something about her reckless mirth and joy in
life--the immense relief of having passed from the sordid life of a
barmaid to this quasi-ladyhood--that enlisted his sympathies. Though
she was always somebody else's mistress until she developed
her special talent as a manageress of high-class houses of
accommodation, "private hotels" on the Continent, chiefly frequented
by English and American _roués_--Praed kept an eye on her career,
and occasionally rendered her, with some cynicism, unobtrusive
friendly services in disentangling her affairs when complications
threatened. He was an art student in those days of the 'seventies,
possessed of about four hundred a year, beginning to go through the
aesthetic phase, and not decided whether he would emerge a painter
of pictures or an architect of grandiose or fantastic buildings. To
his studio Miss Kitty Vavasour or Miss Kate Warren would often come
and pose for the head and shoulders, or for some draped caryatid
wanted for an ambitious porch in an imaginary millionaire's house in
Kensington Palace Gardens. When in 1897, Vivie had learnt about her
mother's "profession," she had flung off violently from all her
mother's "friends," except "Praddy." She even continued to call him
by this nickname, long ago bestowed on him by her mother. At distant
intervals she would pay him a visit at his house and studio near
Hans Place; when Honoria's advice and assistance did not meet the
case of some grave perplexity.

So one afternoon in June, 1901, she came to his little dwelling with
its large studio, and asked to have a long talk to him, whilst his
parlour-maid--he was still a bachelor--denied him to other callers.
They had tea together and Vivie plunged as quickly as possible into
her problem.

"You know, Praddy dear, I want to be a Barrister. But as a female
they will never call me to the Bar. So I'm going to send Vivien
Warren off for a long absence abroad--the few who think about me
will probably conclude that money has carried the day and that I've
gone to help my mother in her business--and in her absence Mr.
Vavasour Williams will take up the running. David V. Williams--don't
interrupt me--will study for the Bar, eat through his terms--six
dinners a year, isn't it?--pass his examinations, and be called to
the English Bar in about three years from now. Didn't you once have
a pupil called Vavasour Williams?"

_Praed_: "What, David, the Welsh boy? Yes. His name reminded me of
your mother in one of her stages. David Vavasour Williams. I took
him on in--let me see? I think it was in 1895 or early 1896. But how
did you hear about him?"

_Vivie_: "Never mind, or never mind for the moment. Tell me some
more about him."

_Praed_: "Well to sum him up briefly he was what school boys and
subalterns would call 'a rotter.' Not without an almost mordid
cleverness; but the Welsh strain in him which in the father turned
to emotional religion--the father was Vicar or Rector of
Pontystrad--came out in the boy in unhealthy fancies. He had almost
the talent of Aubrey Beardsley. But I didn't think he had a good
influence over my other pupils, so before I planned that Italian
journey--on which you refused to accompany me--I advised him to
leave my tuition--I wasn't modern enough, I said. I also advised him
to make up his mind whether he wanted to be a sane architect--he
despised questions of housemaids' closets and sanitation and lifts
and hot-water supply--or a scene painter. I think he might have had
a great career at Drury Lane over fairy palaces or millionaire
dwellings. But I turned him out of my studio, though I put the fact
less brutally before his father--said I should be absent a long
while in Italy and that I feared the boy was too undisciplined.
Afterwards I think he went into some South African police force..."

_Vivie_: "He did, and died last year in a South African hospital.
Had he--er--er--many relations, I mean did he come of well-known
people?"

_Praed_: "I fancy not. His father was just a dreamy old Welsh
clergyman always seeing visions and believing himself a descendant
of the Druids, Sam Gardner told me; and his mother had either died
long ago or had run away from her husband, I forget which. In a way,
I'm sorry David's dead. He had a sort of weird talent and wild good
looks. By the way, he wasn't altogether unlike _you_."

_Vivie_: "Thank you for the double-edged compliment. However what
you say is very interesting. Well now, my idea is that David
Vavasour Williams did _not_ die in a military hospital; he recovered
and returned, firmly resolved to lead a new life.--Is his father
living by the bye? Did he believe his son was dead?"

_Praed_: "Couldn't tell you, I'm sure. I never took any further
interest in him, and until you mentioned it--I don't know on whose
authority--I didn't know he was dead. On the whole a good riddance
for his people, I should say, especially if he died on the field of
honour. But what lunatic idea has entered your mind with regard to
this poor waster?"

_Vivie_: "Why my idea, as I say, is that D.V.W. got cured of his
necrosis of the jaw--I suppose it is not invariably deadly?--came
home with a much improved morale, studied hard, and became a
barrister, thinking it morally a superior calling to architecture
and scene painting. In short, I shall be from this day forth
Vavasour Williams, law-student! Would it be safe, d'you think, in
that capacity to go down and see his old father?"

_Praed_: "_Vivie_! I _did_ think you were a sober-minded young
woman who would steer clear of--of--crime: for this impersonation
would be a punishable offence..."

_Vivie_: "_Crime_? _What_ nonsense! I should consider I was
justified in a Court of Equity if I burnt down or blew up the Law
Courts or one of the Inns or broke the windows of the Chartered
Institute of Actuaries or the Incorporated Law Society. All these
institutions and many others bar the way to honourable and lucrative
careers for educated women, and a male parliament gives us no
redress, and a male press laughs at us for our feeble attempts to
claim common rights with men. Instead of proceeding to such violence
I am merely resorting to a very harmless guile in getting round the
absurd restrictions imposed by the benchers of the Inns of Court,
namely that all who claim a call to the Bar should not be
_accountants_, _actuaries_, _clergymen_ or _women_. I am going to
give up the accountancy business--or rather, the law has never
allowed either Honoria or me to become chartered accountants, so
there is nothing to give up. To avoid any misapprehension she is
going to change the title on our note paper and brass plate to
'General Inquiry Agents.' That will be sufficiently non-committal.
Well then, as to sex disqualification, a few weeks hence I shall
become David Vavasour Williams, and I presume he was a male? You
don't have to pass a medical examination for the Bar, do you?"

_Praed_: "Really, Vivie, you are _unnecessarily_ coarse..."

_Vivie_: "I don't care if I am, poor outlaw that I am! Every avenue
to an honest and ambitious career seems closed to me, either because
I am a woman or--in women's careers--the few that there are--because
I am Kate Warren's daughter. _I_ am not to blame for my mother's
misdeeds, yet I am being punished for them. That beast of a friend
of yours--that filthy swine, George Crofts--set it about after I
refused to marry him that I was 'Mrs. Warren's Daughter,' and the
few nice people I knew from Cambridge days dropped me, all except
Honoria and her mother."

_Praed_: "Well, _I_ haven't dropped you. _I'll_ always stick by
you" (observes that Vivie is trying to keep back her tears).
"Vivie--_darling_--what do you want me to do? Why not marry me and
spend half my income, take the shelter of my name--I'm an A.R.A.
now--You needn't do more than keep house for me.... I'm rather
a valetudinarian--dare say I shan't trouble you long--we
could have a jolly good time before I went off with a heart
attack--travel--study--write books together--"

_Vivie_ (recovering herself): "Thanks, dear Praddy; you are a brick
and I really--in a way--have quite got to love you. Except an office
boy in Chancery Lane and W.T. Stead, I don't know any other decent
man. But I'm not going to marry any one. I'm going to become
Vavasour Williams--the name is rotten, but you must take what you
can get. Williams is a quiet young man who only desires to be left
alone to earn his living respectably at the Bar, and see there if he
cannot redress the balance in the favour of women. But there is
something you _could_ do for me, and it is for that I came to see
you to-day--by the bye, we have both let our tea grow cold, but _for
goodness' sake_ don't order any more on my account, or else your
parlour-maid will be coming in and out and will see that I've been
crying and you look flushed. What I wanted to ask was this--it's
really very simple--_If Mr. Vavasour Williams, aged twenty-four,
late in South Africa, once your pupil in architecture_ or scene
painting or whatever it was--_gives you as a reference to character,
you are to say the best you can of him_. And, by the bye, he will be
calling to see you very shortly and you could lend further
verisimilitude to your story by renewing acquaintance with him. You
will find him very much improved. In every way he will do you
credit. And what is more, if you don't repel him, he will come and
see you much oftener than his cousin--I'm not ashamed to adopt her
as a cousin--Vivie Warren could have done. Because Vivie, with her
deplorable parentage, had your good name to think of, and visited
you very seldom; whereas there could be raised _no_ objection from
your parlour-maid if Mr. D.V. Williams came rather often to chat
with you and ask your advice. Think it over, dear friend--Good-bye."

Early in July, Norie and Vivie were standing at the open west
window in their partners' room at the office, trying to get a little
fresh air. The staff had just gone its several ways to the suburbs,
glad to have three hours of daylight before it for cricket and
tennis. Confident therefore of not being overheard, Vivie began:
"I've got those rooms in Fig Tree Court. I shall soon be ready to
move my things in. I'll leave some of poor Vivie Warren's effects
behind if you don't mind, in case she comes back some day. Do you
think you can rub along if I take my departure next week? I want to
give myself a fortnight's bicycle holiday in Wales--as D.V.
Williams--a kind of honeymoon with Fate, before I settle down as a
law student. After I come back I can devote much of the summer
recess to our affairs, either openly or after office hours. You
could then take a holiday, in August. You badly need one. What about
Beryl?"

_Norie_: "Beryl is well over her accouchement and is confident of
being able to start work here on August 1.... It's a boy this time.
I haven't seen it, so I can't say whether it resembles a policeman
more than an architect. Besides babies up till the age of six months
only resemble macrocephalic idiots.... I shall be _wary_ with
Beryl--haven't committed myself--ourselves to any engagement beyond
six months. She's amazingly clever, but I should say quite
heartless. Two babies in three years, and both illegitimate--the
real Mrs. Architect very much upset, no doubt, Mr. Architect getting
wilder and wilder in his work through trying to maintain two
establishments--they say he left out all the sanitation in Sir Peter
Robinson's new house and let the builders rush up the walls without
damp courses--and it's killing her father, the Dean. It's not as
though she hid herself away, but she goes out so much! They are
talking of turning her out of her club because of the things she
says before the waitresses..."

_Vivie_: "What things?"

_Norie_: "Why, about its being very healthy to have babies when
you're between the ages of twenty and thirty; and how with this
twilight sleep business she doesn't mind how often; that it's fifty
times more interesting than breeding dogs and cats or guinea-pigs;
and she's surprised more single women don't take it up. I think she
must be détraquée.... I have a faint hope that by taking her in hand
and interesting her in our work--which _entre nous deux_--is turning
out to be very profitable--I may sober her and regularize her. No
doubt in 1950 most women will talk as she does to-day, but the
advance is too abrupt. It not only robs _her_ parents of all
happiness, but it upsets _my_ mother. She now wrings her hands over
her own past and fears that by working so strenuously for the
emancipation of women she has assisted to breach the dam--Can't you
imagine the way the old cats of both sexes go on at her?--the dam
which held up female virtue, and that Society now will be drowned in
a flood of Free Love..."

_Vivie_: "Well! We'll give her a six months' trial here, and see if
our mix-up of advice in Law, Banking, Estate management,
Stock-and-share dealing, Divorce, Private Enquiries, probate, etc.,
does not prove _much_ more interesting than an illicit connection
with a hare-brained architect.... If she proves impossible you'll
pack her off and Vivie shall return and D.V. Williams go abroad....
Don't you think there is something that ought to win over Providence
in that happily chosen name? _D.V._ Williams? And my mother once
actually called herself 'Vavasour.'

"Well, then, barring accidents and the unforeseen, it's agreed I go
on my holiday next Saturday, to return never no more--perhaps--?--"

_Norie_ (with a sigh): "Yes!"

_Vivie_: "How's your mother?"

_Norie_: "Oh, as to her, I'm glad to say '_much_ better.' When I
can get away, after the new clerks and Beryl are installed and
everything is going smoothly, I shall take her to Switzerland, to a
deliciously quiet spot I know and nobody else knows up the
Göschenenthal. The Continent won't be so hot for travelling if we
don't start till the end of August..."

_Vivie:_ "_Then_, dearest ... in case you don't come to the office
any more this week, I'll say good-bye--for--for some time..."

(They grip hands, they hesitate, then kiss each other on the cheek,
a very rare gesture on either's part--and separate with tears in
their eyes.)


The following Monday morning, Bertie Adams, combining in his
adolescent person the functions of office boy, junior clerk, and
general factotum, entered the outer office of Fraser and Warren and
found this letter on his desk:--

     Fraser and Warren          Midland Insurance Chambers,
     General Inquiry Agents     88-90, Chancery Lane, W.C.
                                         July 12, 1901.

     DEAR BERTIE--

     I want to prepare you for something. If you had been an
     ordinary Office boy, I should not have bothered about you or
     confided to you anything concerning the Firm. But you are by
     now almost a clerk, and from the day I joined Miss Fraser in
     this business, you have helped me more than you know--helped
     me not only in my work, but to understand that there _can_
     be good, true, decent-minded, trustworthy ... you won't like
     it if I say "boys" ... young men.

     I am going away for a considerable time, I cannot say how
     long--probably abroad. But Miss Fraser thinks I can still
     help in the work of her firm, so I remain a partner. A
     cousin of mine, Mr. D.V. Williams, may come in occasionally
     to help Miss Fraser. I shall ask him to keep an eye on you.
     Miss Rose Mullet and Miss Steynes are likewise leaving the
     service of the firm. I dare say you know Miss Mullet is
     getting married and how Miss Steynes is going to live at
     Aylesbury. Two other ladies are coming in their place, and
     much of my own work will be undertaken by a Mrs. Claridge,
     whom you will shortly see.

     It is rather sad this change in what has been such a happy
     association of busy people, nobody treading on any one
     else's toes; but there it is! "The old order changeth,
     giving place to the new ... lest one good custom should
     corrupt the world"--you will read in the Tennyson I gave you
     last Christmas. Let's hope it won't be when I return:
     "Change and Decay in all around I see" ... as the rather
     dismal hymn has it.

     Sometimes change is a good thing. You serve a noble mistress
     in Miss Fraser and I am sure you realize the importance of
     her work. It may mean so much for women's careers in the
     next generation. I shan't quite lose touch with you. I dare
     say Miss Fraser, even if I am far away, will write to me
     from time to time and give me news of the office and tell me
     how you get on. Don't be ashamed of being ambitious: keep up
     your studies. Why don't you--but perhaps you do?--join
     evening classes at the Polytechnic?--or at this new London
     School of Economics which is close at hand? Make up your
     mind to be Lord Chancellor some day ... even if it only
     carries you as far as the silk gown of a Q.C. I suppose I
     ought now to write "K.C." A few years ago we all thought the
     State would go to pieces when Victoria died. Yet you see we
     are jogging along pretty well under King Edward. In the same
     way, you will soon get so used to the new Head Clerk, Mrs.
     Claridge, that you will wonder what on earth you saw to
     admire in

                                    VIVIEN WARREN.

This letter came like a cricket ball between the eyes to Bertie
Adams. His adored Miss Warren going away and no clear prospect of
her return--her farewell almost like the last words on a death-bed....
He bowed his head over his folded arms on his office desk, and
gave way to gruff sobs and the brimming over of tear and nose glands
which is the grotesque accompaniment of human sorrow.

He forgot for a while that he was a young man of nineteen with an
unmistakable moustache and the status of a cricket eleven captain.
He was quite the boy again and his feeling for Vivien Warren, which
earlier he had hardly dared to characterize, out of his intense
respect for her, became once more just filial affection.

His good mother was a washerwoman-widow, in whom Honoria Fraser had
interested herself in her Harley Street girlhood. Bertie was the
eldest of six, and his father had been a coal porter who broke his
back tumbling down a cellar when a little "on." Bertie--he now
figured as Mr. Albert Adams in the cricket lists--was a well-grown
youth, rather blunt-featured, but with honest hazel eyes,
fresh-coloured, shock-haired. Vivie had once derided him for trying
to woo his frontal hair into a flattened curl with much pomade ...
he now only sleeked his curly hair with water. You might even have
called him "common." He was of the type that went out to the War
from 1914 to 1918, and won it, despite the many mistakes of our
flurried strategicians: the type that so long as it lasts unspoilt
will make England the predominant partner, and Great Britain the
predominant nation; the type out of which are made the bluejacket
and petty officer, the police sergeant, the engine driver, the
railway guard, solicitor's clerk, merchant service mate, engineer,
air-pilot, chauffeur, army non-commissioned officer, head gardener,
head game-keeper, farm-bailiff, head printer; the trustworthy
manservant, the commissionaire of a City Office; and which in other
avatars ran the British World on an average annual income of £150
before the War. When women of a similar educated lower middle class
come into full equality with men in opportunity, they should marry
the Bertie Adamses of their acquaintance and not the stockbrokers,
butchers, drapers, bookies, professional cricketers or pugilists.
They would then become the mothers of the salvation-generation of
the British people which will found and rule Utopia.

However, Bertie Adams was quite unconscious of all these
possibilities, and thought of himself modestly, rather cheaply.
Swallowing the fourth or fifth sob, he rose from his crouching over
the desk, wiped his face with a wet towel, smoothed his hair, put
straight his turn-over collar and smart tie, and went to his work
with glowing eyes and cheeks; resolved to show Miss Warren that she
had not thought too highly of him.

Nevertheless, when Miss Mullet arrived and giggled over the details
of her trousseau and Lily Steynes discussed the advertisements of
Aylesbury ducks in the current _Exchange and Mart_, he was reserved
and rather sarcastic with them both. He intimated later that he had
long been aware of the coming displacements; but he said not a word
of Vivie's letter.




CHAPTER IV

PONTYSTRAD


On a morning in mid-July, 1901, Mr. D.V. Williams bicycled to
Paddington Station from New Square, Lincoln's Inn. The brown canvas
case fitted to the frame of his male bicycle contained a change of
clothes, a suit of paijamas, a safety razor, tooth-brush, hair-brush
and comb. He himself was wearing a well-cut dark grey suit--Norfolk
jacket, knickerbockers and thick stockings.

Having had his bicycle labelled "Swansea," he entered a first-class
compartment of the South Wales express. Though not lavish on his
expenditure he was travelling first because he still felt a little
uneasy in the presence of men--mostly men of the rougher type.
Perhaps there was a second class in those days; there may be still.
But I have a distinct impression that Mr. Vavasour Williams, law
student, travelled "first" on this occasion: for this was how
he met a person of whom his friend, Honoria Fraser, had often
spoken--Michael Rossiter.

He did not of course--till after they had passed Swindon--know the
name of his travelling companion. Five minutes before the train left
Paddington there entered his compartment of the corridor carriage a
tall man with a short, curly black beard and nice eyes--eyes like
agates in colour. There was a touch of grey about the temples,
otherwise the head hair, when he changed from a hard felt hat to a
soft travelling cap, showed as dark as the beard and moustache. His
frame was strong, muscular and loosely built, and he had clever,
nervous hands with fingers somewhat spatulate. His clothes did not
much suggest the tourist--they seemed more like a too well-worn town
morning suit of dark blue serge; as though he had left home in an
absent-minded mood intent on some hurriedly conceived plan. He cast
one or two quick glances at David; once, indeed, as they got out
into full daylight, away from tunnels and high walls, letting his
glance lengthen into a searching look. Then he busied himself with a
number of scientific periodicals he had brought to read in the
train.

Impelled, he knew not why, to provoke conversation, David asked
(quite needlessly), "This _is_ the South Wales express, I mean the
Swansea train, is it not?"

Blackbeard was struck with the unusualness of the voice--a very
pleasant one to come from the lips of a man--and replied: "It is; at
least I got in under that impression as I am intending to go to
Swansea; but in any case the ticket inspector is sure to come along
the corridor presently and we'll make sure then. We stop at Swindon,
I think, so if we've made a mistake we can rectify it there."

Then after a pause he resumed: "I think you said you were going to
Swansea? Might I ask if you are bound on the same errand as I am? I
mean, are you one of Boyd Dawkins's party to examine the new cave on
the Gower coast?"

_D.V.W._: "Oh no--I--I am going inland from Swansea to--to have a
bicycling tour. I'm going to a place on the river--I don't know how
to pronounce it--at least I've forgotten. The river's name is spelt
Llwchwr."

_Blackbeard_: "You should change your mind and turn south--come and
see these extraordinary caves. Are you interested in palæontology?"
(David hesitates) "What careless people call 'prehistoric animals'
or 'prehistoric man.' They have been ridiculously misled by comic
artists in _Punch_ who imagine a few thousand years of Prehistory
would take us back to the Cretaceous period; really four or five
million years before Man came into existence, when this country and
most other lands swarmed with preposterous reptiles that had become
extinct long before the age of mammals. However, I don't suppose
this interests you. I only spoke because I thought you might be one
of Boyd Dawkins's pupils ... or one of mine."

_David_: "On the contrary, I am very, very much interested in the
subject, but I am afraid it has lain rather outside my line of
studies so far--p'raps I will turn south when I have seen something
of the part of Glamorgan I am going to. I'm really Welsh in origin,
but I know Wales imperfectly because I left it when I was quite
young" ("This'll be good practice," Vivie's brain voice was saying
to herself) ... "I've returned recently from South Africa."

_Blackbeard_: "What were you doing there?"

_David_: "I--I--was in the army ... at least in a police force ... I
got wounded, had to go into hospital--necrosis of the jaw ... I came
home when I got well..."

_Blackbeard_: _"Necrosis of the jaw!_ That was a bad thing. But you
seem to have got over it very well. I can't see any scar from where
I am..."

_David_: "Oh no. It was only a _slight_ touch and I dare say I
exaggerate ... I've left the Army however and now I'm reading
Law..."

Blackbeard thinks at this point that he has gone far enough in
cross-examination and returns to his periodicals and pamphlets. But
there's something he likes--a wistfulness--in the young man's face,
and he can't quite detach his mind to the presence of palæolithic
man in South Wales. At Swindon they both get out--there was still
lingering the practice of taking lunch there--have a hasty lunch
together and more talk, and share a bottle of claret.

On returning to their compartment, Rossiter offers David a cigar but
the young man prefers smoking a cigarette. By this time they have
exchanged names. D.V.W. however is reticent about the South African
War--says it was all too horrible for words, and should never have
taken place and he can't bear to think about it and was knocked out
quite early in the day. Now all he asks is peace and quiet and the
opportunity of studying law in London so that he may become some day
a barrister. Rossiter says--after more talk, "Pity you're going in
for the Bar--we've too many lawyers already. You should take up
Science"--and as far as the Severn Tunnel discourses illuminatingly
on biology, mineralogy, astronomy, chemistry as David-Vivien had
never heard them treated previously. In the Severn Tunnel the noise
of the train silences both professor and listener, who willingly
takes up the position of pupil. Between Newport and Neath, David
thinks he has never met any one so interesting. It has been his
first real induction into the greatest of all books: the Book of the
Earth itself. Rossiter on his part feels indefinably attracted by
this young expatriated Welshman. David does not say much, but what
he does contribute to the conversation shows him a quick thinker and
a person of trained intelligence. Yet somehow the professor of
Biology in the University of London--and many other things
beside--F.R.S., F.Z.S., F.L.S., Gold Medallist of this and that
Academy and University abroad--does not "see" him as a soldier or a
non-commissioned officer in the British Army: law-student is a more
likely qualification. However as they near Swansea, Michael Rossiter
gives Mr. D.V. Williams his card (D.V.W. regrets he cannot
reciprocate but says he has hardly settled down yet to any address)
and--though as a rule he is taciturn in trains and cautious about
making acquaintances--expresses the hope he will call at 1, Park
Crescent some afternoon--"My wife and I are generally at home on
Thursdays"--when all are back in town for the autumn. They separate
at Swansea station.


David spends the night at Swansea, employing some of his time there
by enquiring at the Terminus Hotel as to the roads that lead up the
valley of the Llwchwr, what sort of a place is Pontystrad ("the
bridge by the meadow"), whether any one knows the clergyman of that
parish, Mr.... er ... Howel Vaughan Williams. The "boots" or one of
the "bootses," it appears, comes from the neighbourhood of
Pontystrad and knows the reverend gentleman by sight--a nice old
gentleman--has heard that he's aged much of late years since his son
ran away and disappeared out in Africa. His sight was getting bad,
Boots understood, and he could not see to do all the reading and
writing he was once so great at.

After a rather wakeful night, during which D.V. Williams is more
disturbed by his thoughts and schemes than by the continual noises
of the trains passing into and out of Swansea, he rises early and
drafts a telegram:--


     Revd. Howel Williams, Vicarage, Pontystrad, Glamorgan. Hope
     return home this evening. All is well.

                                          DAVID.

Then pays his bill and tries to mount his bicycle the wrong way to
the great amusement of the Boots; then remembers the right way and
rides off, with the confidence of one long accustomed to bicycling,
through the crowded traffic of Swansea in the direction of Llwchwr.

It was a very hot ride through a very lovely country, now largely
spoilt by mining and metallurgy, along a road that was constantly
climbing up steeply to descend abruptly. David of course could have
travelled by rail to the Pontyffynon station and thence have ridden
back three miles to Pontystrad. But he wished purposely to bicycle
the whole way from Swansea and take in with the eye the land of his
fathers. He was postponing as long as possible the test of meeting
his father, the father of the young n'eer-do-weel who had been lying
for months in a South African field hospital the year before. He
halted for a cup of tea at Llandeilotalybont ... Wales has many
place names like this ... and being there not many miles from
Pontystrad was able to glean more recent and more circumstantial
information about the man he proposed to greet as "father."

At half-past six that evening, having perspired and dried, perspired
and dried, strained a tendon and acquired a headache, he halted
before the gate of the Vicarage garden at Pontystrad, having been
followed thither to his secret annoyance by quite a troop of village
boys of whom he had imprudently asked the way. As they talked Welsh
he could not tell what they were saying, but conjectured that his
telegram had arrived and that he was expected.

Standing under the porch of the house was an old man with a long
white beard like a Druid in spectacles shading his eyes and
expectant...

A bicycle might prove an incumbrance in the ensuing interview, so
David hastily propped his against a fuchsia hedge and hurried
forward to meet the old man, who extended hands to envelop him, not
trusting to his eyes. An old, rosy-cheeked woman in a sunbonnet came
up behind the old man, shrieked out "Master David!" and only waited
with twitching fingers for her own onslaught till the father had
first embraced his prodigal son. This was done at least three times,
accompanied with tears, blessings, prayers, the uplifting of poor
filmy eyes to a cloudless Heaven--"Diolch i Dduw!"--ejaculations as
to the wonder of it--"Rhyfeddol yw yn eiholl ffyrdd"--God's
Providence--His ways are past finding out! "Ni ellir olrain ei
Ragluniaeth!"--"My own dear boy! Fy machgen annwyli!"

Then the old woman took her turn: "Master David! Eh, but you're
changed, mun!"--then a lot of Welsh exclamations, which until the
Welsh can agree to spell their tongue phonetically I shall not
insert--"Five years since you left us! Eh, and I never thought to
see you no more. Some said you wass dead, others that you wass taken
prisoner by the Wild Boars. But here you are, and welcome--indeed--"
Then Master David between the embraces was scanned, a little more
critically than by the purblind father, but with distinct approval.

At last David stood apart in the stone-flagged hall of the Vicarage.
His abundant hair was rumpled, his face was stained by other
people's tears, his collar, tie, dress disordered, and his heart
touched. It was a rare experience in his twenty-four years of
life--he guessed that should be his age--to find himself really
taken on trust, really desired and loved. Honoria's friendship
was a pure and precious thing, but in its very purity carefully
restrained. Praddy's kindness, and the office boy's worship had both
been gratifying to Vivie's self-esteem, but both had to be kept at
bay. Somehow the love of a father and of an old nurse were of a
different category to these other contacts.

All these thoughts passed through David's brain in thirty seconds.
He shook himself, straightened himself, smiled adequately, and tried
to live up to the situation.

"Dear father! And dear ... Nannie! (A bold but successful
deduction). How sweet of you both--greeting me like this. I've come
home a very different David to the one that left you--what was it?
Five--six years ago?--to go to Mr. Praed's studio. I've learnt a lot
in the interval. But I'm so sick of the past, I don't want to talk
about it more than I can help, and I've been in very queer health
since I got ill--and--wounded--in--South Africa. My memory has gone
for many things--I'm afraid I've forgotten all my Welsh, Nannie, but
it'll soon come back, that is, if I may stay here a bit."
(Exclamations from father and nurse: "This is your _home_,
Davy-bach!") "I'm not going to stay too long this time because I've
got my living to earn in London....

"Did you never hear anything about me from ... South Africa ... or
the War Office--or--your old college chum, Mr. Gardner?"

"I heard--my own dear boy--" said the Revd. Howel, again taking him
in his arms in a renewed spasm of affection. "I heard you were
wounded and very ill in the camp hospital at Colesberg. It was a
nursing sister, I think, who sent me the information. I wrote
several times to the War Office, my letters were acknowledged, that
was all. Then Sam Gardner wrote to me from Margate and said his son
had been in the same hospital with you. Later on I saw in a Bristol
paper that this hospital--Colesberg--had fallen into the hands of
the Boers and the Cape insurgents. Then I said to myself 'My poor
boy's been taken prisoner' and as time went on, 'My poor boy's dead,
or he would have written to me.'"

Here the Revd. Howel stopped to wipe his eyes and blow his nose.
David touched through his armour of cynicism, said--Nannie retiring
to prepare the evening meal--"Father dear, though I don't want to
refer too often to the past, I behaved disgracefully some time ago
and the Colonies seemed my only chance of setting myself right. I
did manage to get away from the Boers, but I had not the courage to
present myself before you till I had done something to regain your
good opinion. I have got now good employment in London and I'm even
reading up Law. We will talk of that by and bye but I tell you
now--from my heart--I am a different David to the one you knew, and
you shall never regret taking me back."

Both father and son were crying now, for emotion especially in Wales
is catching. But the father laughed through his tears; and
incoherently thanked God for the return of the prodigal--a fine
upstanding lad--whole and sound. "No taint about _you_, Davy, _I'll_
be bound. Why your voice alone shows you've been a clean liver. It's
music in my ears, and if I could see as well as I can hear I'd wager
you're a handsome lad and have lost much of your foolishness. Davy,
lad" (lowering his voice) "you've no cause to be anxious about
Jenny. She--she--had a boy, but we got her married to a miner--I
made it right with him. She has another child now, but they're being
brought up together. We won't refer to it again. She lives twenty
miles from here, at Gower--and ... and ... there's an end of it....

"Now you won't run away back to London till you're obliged? Where's
your luggage? At Pontyffynon?"

"No," said David, a little non-plussed at evidences of his dissolute
past and this unexpected fatherhood assumed on his account. "I
haven't more luggage than what is contained in my bicycle bag. But
don't let that concern you. I'll go over to Swansea one day or some
nearer town and buy what may be necessary, and I'll stay with you
all my holidays, tell you all my plans, and even after I go back to
London I'll always come down here when I can get away. For the
present I'm going simply to enjoy myself for the first time in my
life. The last four years we'll look on as a horrid dream. What a
paradise you live in." His eye ranged over the two-storeyed,
soundly-built stone house facing south, with mountains behind and
the western sun throwing shafts of warm yellow green over the lawn
and the flower beds; over clumps of elms in the middle, southern
distance, that might have been planted by the Romans (who loved this
part of Wales). Bees, butterflies and swallows were in the air; the
distant lowing of kine, the scent of the roses, the clatter in the
kitchen where Nannie aided by another female servant was preparing
supper, even the barking of a watch dog; aware that something
unusual was going on, completed the impression of the blissful
countryside. "What a paradise you live in! How _could_ I have left
it?"

"Ay, dear lad; I doubt not it looks strange and new to you since
you've been in South Africa and London. But it'll soon seem homelike
enough. And now you'll like to see your room, and have a wash before
supper. Tom, the gardener, shall take in your bicycle and give it a
rub over. I've still got the old one here in the coach-house which
you left behind. Tom's new, since you left. He's not so clever with
the bees as your old friend Evan was, but he's a steadier lad. I
fear me Evan led you into some of your scrapes. The fault was partly
mine. I shouldn't have let you run wild so much, but I was so
wrapped up in my studies--Well, well!"

David was careful to play his part sufficiently to say when shown
into his old bedroom, "Just the same, father; scarcely a bit
altered--but isn't the bed moved--to another place?"

"You're right, my boy--Ah! your memory can't be as bad as you
pretend. Yes, we moved it there, Bridget and I, because the
Archdeacon came once to stay and complained of the draught from the
window."

"The deuce he did!" said David. "Well, _I_ shan't complain of
anything."

His father left him and he then proceeded to lay out the small
store of things he had brought in his bicycle bag, giving special
prominence to the shaving tackle. He had just finished a summary
toilet when there was a tap on the door, and, suppressing an
exclamation of impatience--for he dearly wanted time and solitude
for collected thought--he admitted Bridget.

"Well, Nannie," he said, "come for a gossip?"

"Yess. I can hardly bear to take my eyes off you, for you've
changed, you _have_ changed. And yet, I don't know? You don't look
much older than you wass when you went off to London to be an
architect. Your cheek--" (lifting her hand and stroking it, while
David tried hard not to wince) "Your cheek's as soft and smooth as
it was then, as any young girl's. Wherever you've been, the world
has not treated you very bad. No one would have dreamt you'd been
all the way to South Africa to them Wild Boars. But some men wear
wonderful well. I suppose your father giv' you a bit of a shock?
He's much older looking; and he wassn't suffering, to speak of, from
his sight when you went away. And now he can hardly see to read even
with his new spectol. Old Doctor Murgatroyd can't do nothing for
him--Advises him to go to see some Bristol or London eye-doctor. But
after you seemed to disappear in Africa he had no heart for trying
to get his sight back. He'd sit for hours doing nothing but think
and talk, all about old Welsh times, or Bible times. Of course he
knows hiss services by heart; hiss only job wass with the
Lessons.... But you see, he'd often only have me and the girl and
Tom in church. There's a new preacher up at Little Bethel that's
drawn all the village folk to hear him. But your father'll be a
different man now--you see, he'll be like a boy again. And if you
could stay long enough, you might take him to Bristol--or Clifton I
think it wass--to see if they could do anything about his eyes....

"The past's the past and we aren't going to say no more about it,
and now you've turned over a new leaf--somehow I _can't_ feel you're
the same person--don't go worrying yourself about that slut Jenny.
_She's_ all right. After your baby was born at her mother's, she
went into service at Llanelly and there she met a miner who's at
work on the new coal mine in Gower. He wasn't a bad sort of chap and
when he'd heard her story he said for a matter of twenty pound he'd
marry her and take over her baby. So your father paid the twenty
pounds, and if she'll only keep straight she'll be none the worse
for what's happened. I always said it wass my fault. It wass the
year I had to go away to my sister, and your father had to go to St.
David's, and after all, if it hadn't 'a-been you, it 'd 'a-been
young Evan. Why there's bin some girls in the village have had two
and even three babies before they settled down and got married. Now
we must dish up supper. I've given you lots and lots of pancakes and
the cream and honey you wass always so fond of--you bad boy--" She
ventured a kiss on the smooth cheek of her nursling and heavily
descended the stairs.


David had a very bad night, because to please his old nurse he had
eaten too many of her pancakes with cream and honey. In fact, he had
at last to tip-toe down through a sleeping house cautiously to let
himself out and relieve his feelings by pacing the verandah till the
nausea passed off. After that he lay long awake trying to size up
the situation. He got his thoughts at last into some such shape as
this:--

"It's clear I was a regular young rake before I was sent up to
London to be Praddy's pupil. Apparently I seduced the housemaid or
kitchenmaid--my father's establishment seems to consist of Nannie
who is housekeeper and cook, and a maid who does housework and
helps in the kitchen--and this unfortunate girl who fell a prey to
my solicitations--or more likely misled me--afterwards gave birth to
a child attributed either to my fatherhood or the gardener's. But
the matter has been hushed up by a payment of twenty pounds and the
girl is now married and respectable and ought to give no further
trouble. I suppose that was a climax of naughtiness on my part and
the main reason why I was sent away. The two people who matter most
have received me without doubt or question, but the one to be
wary about is the old nurse, whose very affection makes her
inconveniently inquisitive. _Mem._ get up and lock my door, or else
she may come in with hot water or something in the morning and take
me by surprise.

"The original David is evidently dead and well out of the way. There
can be no harm in my taking his place, at any rate for a few years:
it may give the old man new life and genuine happiness, for I shall
play my part as a good son, and certainly shall cost him nothing.
I'll begin by taking him to an oculist and finding out what is wrong
with his eyes.... Probably only cataract. It may be possible to
effect a cure and he can then finish his book on the history of
Glamorganshire from earliest times. Must remember, by the bye, that
the Welsh change most of the old _m's_ into _f's_ and that this
country is called Forganwg, with the _w_ pronounced like _oo_, and
the _f_ like _v_. Must learn some Welsh. What a nuisance. But
nothing is worth doing if it isn't done well. If I can keep this
deception up this would be a jolly place to come to for occasional
holidays, and I simply couldn't have a better reference to
respectability, sex and station with the benchers of Lincoln's Inn
than 'my father,' the Revd. Howel Williams, Vicar of Pontystrad.
They'll probably want a second or a third reference. Can I rely on
Praddy? Is it possible I might work up my acquaintance with that
professor whom I met in the train? I'll see. Perhaps I could attend
classes of his if he lectures in London."

Then the plotting David fell asleep at last and woke to hear the
loud tapping on his door at eight o'clock, of Bridget, rather
surprised to find the door locked, but entering (when he had garbed
himself in his Norfolk jacket and opened the door), with hot water
for shaving and a cup of tea.

It was a hot July morning, and while he dressed, the southern breeze
came in through the open window scented by the roses and the lemon
verbena growing against the wall. His father was pacing up and down
the hall and the verandah restlessly awaiting him, fearing lest the
whole episode of the day before might not have been one of his
waking dreams. His failing sight made reading almost a torture and
writing more a matter of feeling than visual perception. Time
therefore hung wearisomely on his hands; Bridget was not a good
reader, besides being too busy a housekeeper to have time for it.
Had David really returned to him? Would he sometimes read aloud and
sometimes write his letters, or even the finish of his History? Too
good to be true!

But there was David coming down the stairs, greeting him with tender
affection. "Read and write for you, father? Of course! But before I
go back to London--and unfortunately I _must_ go back early in
August--I'm going to take you to see an oculist--Bristol or Clifton
perhaps--and get your sight restored."

After breakfast, however, the father decided he must take David
round the village, to see and be seen. David was not very anxious to
go, but as the Revd. Howel looked disappointed he gave in.

It had to be got over some time or other. So they first visited the
church, a building in the form of a cross, with an imposing
battlemented tower. Here David asked to inspect the registers and
found therein (while the old gentleman silently prayed or sat in
mute thankfulness in a sunny corner)--the record of his father's
marriage to Mary Vavasour twenty-six years before (Mary was
twenty-three and the Revd. Howel forty at the time) and of his own
baptism two years afterwards.

Then issuing from the church, father and son walked through the
village, the father pointing out the changes for better or worse
that had taken place in four years, and not noticing the vagueness
of his son's memories of either persons or features in the
landscape. The village, like most Welsh villages, was of
white-washed cottages, slate-roofed, but it was embowered with that
luxuriance of foliage and flowers which makes Glamorganshire--out of
sight of the coal-mining--seem an earthly paradise. Every now and
then the Revd. Howel would nudge his son and say: "That man who
spoke was old Goronwy, as big a scoundrel now as he was five years
ago," or he would introduce David to a villager of whom he thought
more favourably. If she were a young woman she generally smirked and
looked sideways; if a man he grunted out a Welsh greeting or only
gave a nod of surly recognition. Several professed fluent
recognition but some said in Welsh "he wasn't a bit like the Mr.
David _they_ had known." Whereupon the Revd. Howel laughed and said:
"Wait till you have been out to South Africa fighting for your king
and country and see if _that_ doesn't change _you_!"

The visit to the Clifton oculist resulted in a great success. The
oculist after two or three days' preparation in a nursing home
performed the operation and advised David then to leave his father
for a few days (promising if any unfavourable symptoms supervened he
would telegraph) so that he might pass the time in sleep as much as
possible, and with no mental stimulation. During this interval David
transferred himself and his bicycle to Swansea, and thence visited
the Gower caves where he ran up against Rossiter once more and
spent delightful hours being inducted into palæontology by Rossiter
and his companions. Then back to--by contrast--boresome Clifton
(except for its Zoological Gardens). After another week his father
was well enough to be escorted home. In another fortnight he might
be able to use his eyes, and soon after that would be able to read
and write--in moderation.

But David could not wait to see his intervention crowned with
complete success. He must keep faith with Honoria who would be
wanting a long holiday in Switzerland; and their joint business must
not suffer by his absence from London. There were, indeed, times
when the peace and comfort and beauty of Pontystrad got hold of him
and he asked himself: "Why not settle down here for the rest of his
life, put aside other ambitions, attempt no more than this initial
fraud, leave the hateful world wherein women had only three chances
to men's seven." Then there would arise once more fierce ambition,
the resolve to avenge Vivien Warren for her handicaps, the desire to
keep tryst with Honoria and to enjoy more of Rossiter's society.
Besides, he ran a constant risk of discovery under the affectionate
but puzzled inspection of the old nurse. In her mind, residence
amongst the "Wild Boars," service in an army, travel and adventure
generally during an absence of five years, as well as emergence from
adolescence into manhood, accounted for much change in physical
appearance, but not sufficiently for the extraordinary change in
_morale_: the contrast between the vicious, untidy, selfish,
insolent boy that had gone off to London with ill-concealed glee in
1896 and this grave-mannered, polite, considerate, pleasant-voiced
young man who had already managed to find good employment in London
before he revealed himself anew to his delighted father.

These doubts David read in Nannie's mind. But he would not give
them time and chance to become more precise and formulated.
Gradually she would become used to the seeming miracle. In the
meantime he would return to London, and if his father's recovery was
complete he would not revisit "home" till Christmas. As soon as he
was able to write, his father would forward him the copy of his
birth-certificate, and he would likewise answer in the sense agreed
upon any letters of reference or enquiry: would state the
apprenticeship to architecture with Praed A.R.A., and then the
impulse to go out to South Africa, the slight wound--David insisted
it was slight, a fuss about nothing, because he had enquired about
necrosis of the jaw and realized that even if he had recovered it
would have left indisputable marks on face and throat. In fact there
were so many complications involved in an escape from the Boers,
only to be justified under the code of honour prevailing in war
time, that he would rather his father said little or nothing about
South Africa but left him to explain all that. A point of view
readily grasped by the Revd. Howel, who to get such a son back would
even have not thought too badly of desertion--and the negative
letters of the War Office said nothing of that.

So early in September, after the most varied, anxious, successful
six weeks in his life--so far--David Vavasour Williams returned to
Fig Tree Court, Inner Temple.




CHAPTER V

READING FOR THE BAR


It had been a hot, windless day in London, in early September.
Though summer was in full swing in the country without a hint of
autumn, the foliage in the squares and gardens of the Inns of Court
was already seared and a little shrivelled. The privet hedges were
almost black green; and the mould in the dismal borders that they
screened looked as though it had never known rain or hose water and
as if it could no more grow bright-tinted flowers than the asbestos
of a gas stove which it resembled in consistency and colour. It was
now an evening, ending one of those days which are peculiarly
disheartening to a Londoner returned from a long stay in the depths
of the country--a country which has hills and streams, ferny
hollows, groups of birches, knolls surmounted with pines, meadows of
lush, emerald-green grass, full-foliaged elms, twisted oaks,
orchards hung with reddening apples, red winding lanes between
unchecked hedges, blue mountains in the far distance, and the
glimpse of a river or of ponds large enough to be called a mere or
even a lake. The exhausted London to which David Williams had
returned a few days previously had lost a few thousands of its
West-end and City population--just, in fact, most of its interesting
if unlikable folk, its people who mattered, its insolent spoilt
darlings whom you liked to recognize in the Carlton atrium, in Hyde
Park, in a box at the theatre: yet the frowsy, worthy millions were
there all the same. The air of its then smelly streets was used up
and had the ammoniac strench of the stable. It was a weary London.
The London actors had not returned from Cornwall and Switzerland.
Provincial companies enjoyed--a little anxiously owing to uncertain
receipts at the box office--a brief license on the boards of famous
play-houses. The newspapers had exhausted the stunt of the silly
season and were at their flattest and most yawn-provoking. The South
African War had reached its dreariest stage....

Bertie Adams on this close September evening had out-stayed the
other employés of _Fraser and Warren_ in their fifth floor office at
No. 88-90 Chancery Lane. He had remained after office hours to do a
little work, a little "self-improvement"; and he was just about to
close the outer office and leave the key with the housekeeper, when
the lift came surging up and out of it stepped a young man in a
summer suit and a bowler hat who, to Bertie's astonishment, not only
dashed straight at the door of the partners' room, but opened its
Yale lock with a latch-key as though long accustomed to do so. "But,
sir!..." exclaimed the junior clerk (his promotion to that rank had
tacitly dated from Vivie Warren's departure). "It's all right," said
the stranger. "I'm Mr. David Williams and I've come to draw up some
notes for Mrs. Claridge. I dare say Miss Fraser has told you I
should work in the office every now and then whilst my cousin--Miss
Warren, you know--is away. You needn't wait, though you can close
the outer office before you go; and, by the bye, you might fetch me
_Who's Who_ for the present year." All this was said a little
breathlessly.

Bertie brought the volume, then only half the size of its present
bulk, because it lacked our new nobility and gave no heed to your
favourite recreation. D.V. Williams stood in the yellow light of the
west window, reading a letter... "Cousin? No! Twin brother,
perhaps; but had she one?..." mused Bertie... and then, that
never-to-be-forgotten voice ... "Here's 'Oo's Oo--er--Hoo's Hoo, I
mean.... Miss..." He only added the last word as by some
sub-conscious instinct.

"_Mister_ Williams," said Vivien-David-Warren Williams, facing him
with resolute eyes. "Be quite clear about that, Adams; _David
Vavasour Williams_, Miss Warren's cousin."

"Indeed I will be, Miss ... Mister ... er ... Sir..." said the
transfigured Bertie (his brain voice saying over and over again in
ecstasy ... "_I_ tumble to it! _I_ tumble to it!"). And then again
"_Indeed_ I will, Mr. Williams. I'm a bit stupidlike this evenin'
... readin' too much.... May I stay and help you, Sir? I'm pretty
quick on the typewriter, Miss Warren may have told you ... Sir ...
and I ain't--I mean--_I am not_--half bad with me shorthand.... You
know--I mean, _she_ would know I'd joined them evenin' classes..."

"Thank you, Adams; but if you have joined the evening classes you
oughtn't to interrupt your attendance there. I can _quite_ manage
here alone and you need not be afraid: I shall leave everything
properly closed. You could give up the key of the outer office as
you go out. You may often find me at work here after office hours,
but that need not disturb you ... and I need hardly say, after all
Miss Fraser and Miss Warren have told me about you, I rely on you to
be at all times thoroughly discreet and not likely to discuss the
work of this firm or my share in it with any one?"...

"Indeed you may ... Mr. Williams ... indeed you may.... Oh! I'm so
happy.... Good-night ... Sir!"

And Adams's heart was too full for attendance at a lecture on Roman
law. He went off instead to the play. He himself belonged now to the
world of romance. He knew of things--and wild horses and red-hot
tweezers should not tear the knowledge from him, or make him
formulate his deductions--he knew of things as amazing, as prodigal
of developments as anything in the problem play enacted beyond the
pit and the stalls; he was the younger brother of Herbert Waring and
the comrade of Jessie Joseph: at that moment deceiving the sleuth
hounds of Stage law by parading in her fiancé's evening dress and
going to prison for his sake.

Beryl Claridge had taken up much of Vivie Warren's work on the 1st
of August in that year, while Honoria Fraser was touring in
Switzerland. Miss Mullet and Miss Steynes were replaced (Steynes
staying on a little later to initiate the new-comers) by two young
women so commonplace yet such efficient machines that their names
are not worth hunting up or inventing. If I have to refer to them I
will call them Miss A. and Miss B.

Beryl Claridge was closely scanned by Bertie Adams, and frequently
compared in his mind with the absent and idealized Vivie. He decided
that although she was shrewd and clever and very good-looking, he
did not like her. She smoked too many cigarettes for 1901. She had
her curly hair "bobbed" (though the term was not invented then). She
put up her feet too high and too often; so much so that the
scandalized Bertie saw she wore black knickerbockers and no
petticoats under her smart "tailor-made." She snapped your head off,
was short, sharp and insolent, joked too much with the spectacled
women clerks (who became her willing slaves); then would ask Bertie
about his best girl and tell him he'd got jolly good teeth, a good
biceps and quite a nice beginning of a moustache.

But she was a worker: no doubt of that! Of course, in the dead
season there were not many clients to shock or to win over by her
nonchalant manners, only a few women who required advice as to
houses, stocks, and shares, law, or private enquiries as to the
good faith of husbands or fiancés. Such as found their way up in the
lift were a little disappointed at seeing Beryl in Vivie's chair or
at not being received by their old friend Honoria Fraser. But Beryl
was too good a business woman to put them off with any license of
speech or manners. For the rest she spent August and early September
in "mugging up" the firm's business. Although deep down in her
curious little heart, under all her affectation of hardness and
insolent disdain of public or family opinion she firmly loved her
architect and the children she had borne him, she desired quite as
passionately to be self-supporting, to earn a sufficient income of
her own, to be dependent on no one. She might have her passing
caprices and her loose and flippant mode of talking, but she wasn't
going to be a failure, a cadger, a parasite, a "fallen" woman. She
fully realized that in England no woman _has_ fallen who is
self-supporting, whose income meets her expenses and who pays her
way. Given those guarantees, all else that she does which is not
actually criminal is eventually put down to mere eccentricity.

So Honoria's offer and Honoria's business provided her with a most
welcome opening. She realized the opportunities that lay before this
Woman's Office for General Inquiries, established in the closing
years of the nineteenth century--this business that before Woman's
enfranchisement nibbled discreetly at the careers and the openings
for profit-making hitherto rigidly reserved for Man. She wasn't
going to let Honoria down. Honoria, she realized, was in herself
equivalent to many thousands of pounds in capital. Her reputation
was flawless. She was known to and esteemed by a host of women of
the upper middle class. Her Cambridge reputation for learning, her
eventual inheritance of eighty thousand pounds were unexpressed
reasons for many a woman of good standing preferring to confide her
affairs to the judgment of _Fraser and Warren_, in preference to
dealing with male legal advisers, male land agents, men on the Stock
Exchange, men in house property business.

So Beryl became in most respects a source of strength to Honoria
Fraser, deprived for a time of the overt co-operation of her junior
partner.

Beryl in the first few weeks of her stay evinced small interest in
the departure of Vivien Warren and her reasons for going abroad. She
had a scheme of her own in which her architect would take a
prominent part, for providing women--authoresses, actresses, or the
wives of the newly enriched--with week-end cottages; the desire for
which was born with the Twentieth century and fostered by the
invention of motors and bicycles. Cases before the firm for opinions
on intricate legal problems Beryl was advised to place before the
consideration of one of Honoria's friends, a law student, Mr. D.V.
Williams, who would shortly be back from his holiday and who had
agreed to look in at the office from time to time and go through
such papers as were set aside for him to read. Beryl had
remarked--without any intention behind it--on seeing some of his
notes initialled V.W. that it was rum he should have the same
initials as that Vivie girl whom she remembered at Newnham ... who
was "so silent and standoffish and easily shocked." But she noticed
later that when Mr. Williams got to work his initials were really
three and not two--D.V.W. One thing with the other: her departure
from the office at the regular closing hour--five--so that she might
see her babies before they were put to bed; Williams's habit of
coming to work after six; kept them from meeting till the October of
1901. When they did meet after Honoria's return from Switzerland,
Beryl scanned the law student critically; decided he was rather
nice-looking but very pre-occupied; perhaps engaged to some girl
whose parents objected; rather mysterious, _quand même_; she had
heard some one say this Mr. David Williams was a cousin or something
of Vivie Warren ... what if he were in love with Vivie and she had
gone away because she had some fad or other about not wanting to
marry? Well! All this could be looked into some other time, if it
were worth bothering about at all. Or could Williams be spoony on
Honoria? After her money? He was much younger--evidently--but young
men adored ripe women, and young girls idolized elderly soldiers.
_C'était à voir_ (Beryl ever since she had been to Paris on a stolen
honeymoon with the architect liked saying things to herself in
French).

Towards the end of October, David received at Fig Tree Court a
letter from his father in Glamorganshire.

                                    Pontystrad Vicarage,
                                     _October_ 20, 1901.

     MY DEAR SON,--

     The improvement in my sight continues. I can now read a
     little every day, by daylight, without pain or fatigue, and
     write letters. I feel I owe you a long one; but I shall
     write a portion each day and not try my eyes unduly.

     I am glad to know you are now settled down in chambers at
     Fig Tree Court in the Temple and have begun your studies for
     the Bar. You could not have taken up a finer profession.
     What seems to me so wonderful is that you should be able to
     earn your living at the same time and be no charge on me. I
     accept your assurances that you need no support; but never
     forget, my dear Son, that if you _do_, I am ready and
     willing to help. You sowed your wild oats--perhaps we both
     exaggerated the sins of the wild years--at any rate you have
     made a noble reparation. What a splendid school the Colonies
     must be! What a difference between the David who left me
     five years ago for Mr. Praed's studio and the David who
     returned to me last summer! I can never be sufficiently
     thankful to Almighty God for the change He has wrought in
     you! No lip religion, but a change of heart. I presume you
     explained everything to the Colonial Office after you got
     back to London and that you are now free to take up a civil
     career? The people out there never sent me any further
     information; but the other day one of my letters to you
     (written after I had received the sad news) returned to me,
     with the information that the hospital you were in had been
     captured by the Boers and that you could not be traced. I
     enclose it. You can now finish up the story yourself and let
     the authorities know how you got away and returned home.

     The other day that impudent baggage Jenny Gorlais came and
     asked to see me ... she said her husband was out of work and
     refused to give her enough money to provide for all her
     children, that he had advised her to apply to _you_ for the
     maintenance of _your_ son! Relying on what you had told me I
     sent for Bridget and we both told her we had made every
     enquiry and now refused absolutely to believe in her stories
     of five years ago--that we were sure you were _not_ the
     father of her eldest child. Bridget, for example, believed
     the postman was its father. Jenny burst into tears, and as
     she did not persist in her claim my heart was moved, and I
     gave her ten shillings, but told her _pretty plainly_ that
     if she ever made such a claim again I should go to the
     police. You should have heard Bridget defending you! _Such_
     a champion. If you want a witness to character for your
     references you should call _her_! She is loud in your
     praise.

                                          _October_ 22.

     There is one thing I want to tell you; and it is easier to
     write it than say it. Your mother did not die when you were
     three years old--much worse: she left me--ran away with an
     engineer who was tracing out the branch railway. He seemed a
     nice young fellow and I had him often up at the Vicarage,
     and _that_ was the way he repaid my hospitality! He wrote to
     me a year afterwards asking me to divorce her. As though a
     Clergyman of the Church of England could do such a thing! I
     had offered to take her back--not then--it would have been a
     mockery--but by putting advertisements into the South Wales
     papers. But after her paramour's letter--which I did not
     answer--I never heard any more about her....

["Damn it all," said David to himself at this juncture of the
letter--he was training himself to swear in a moderate, gentlemanly
way--"Damn it all! Whatever I do, it seems I _cannot_ come from
altogether respectable stock."...]

     You grew up therefore without a mother's care, though good
     Bridget did her best. When you were a child I fear I rather
     neglected you. I was so disappointed and embittered that I
     sought consolation in the legends of our beloved country and
     in Scriptural exegesis. You were rather a naughty boy at
     Swansea Grammar School and somewhat of a scamp at Malvern
     College--Well! we won't go over all that again. I quite
     understand your reticence about the past. Once again I think
     the blame was mine as much as yours. I ought to have
     interested myself more in your pursuits and games ... what a
     pity, by the bye, that you seem to have lost your gift of
     drawing and painting! I do remember how at one time we were
     drawn together over the old Welsh legends and the very
     clever drawings you made of national heroes and
     heroines--they seemed to come on you as quite a surprise
     when I took them out of the old portfolio.

     But about your mother--for it is necessary you should know
     all I can tell you in case you have to answer questions as
     to your parentage. Your mother's name was, as you know, Mary
     Vavasour. It is a common name in South Wales though it seems
     to be Norman French. She came to our Pontystrad school as a
     teacher in 1873. Her father was something to do with mining
     at Merthyr. I fell in love with her--she had a sweet
     face--and married her in 1874. You were born two years
     afterwards. Bridget had been my housekeeper before I was
     married and I asked her to stay on lest your mother should
     be inexperienced at first in the domestic arts. They never
     got on well together and when Mary had recovered from her
     confinement and seemed disposed to take up housekeeping I
     sent away poor Bridget reluctantly and only took her back
     after your mother's flight. Bridget was a second mother to
     you as you know, though I fear you never showed her much
     affection till these later days.


                                          _October_ 23.

     My eyes seem to be improving instead of getting tired with
     the new delights of reading and writing. I owe all this to
     you and to the clever oculist at Clifton. Dr. Murgatroyd
     from Pontyffynon looked in here the other day, to ask about
     your return. He seemed almost to grudge me my restored sight
     because I had got it from other people's advice. Said _he_
     could have advised an operation only he never believed my
     heart would stand it. When I told him they had mixed the
     anæsthetic with oxygen he became quite angry--and exclaimed
     against these new-fangled notions. But I must not use up my
     new found energy writing about him. I want to finish my
     letter in a business-like fashion so that you may know all
     that is necessary to be known about yourself and your
     position. You may have at any moment to answer questions
     before you get called to the Bar, and with your defective
     memory--I am glad to hear things in the past are becoming
     clearer to you--I am sure with God's grace you will wholly
     recover soon from the effects of your wound and your
     illness--What was I writing? I meant to say that you ought
     to know the main facts about your family and your position.

     I was an only son. Your grandfather was a prosperous farmer
     and auctioneer. You have distant cousins, Vaughans and
     Williamses, and some others living at Shrewsbury named
     Price. I have written to none of them about your return
     because they never evinced any interest in me or my
     concerns. Your mother's people, her Vavasour relations at
     Cardiff--did not seem to me to be very respectable, though
     her father was a well-educated man for his position. He
     died--I heard--in a mine accident.

     I am not poorly off for a Welsh clergyman. My mother--a
     Price of Ystrwy--wanted me to go into the Church and
     prevailed on your grandfather to send me first to Malvern
     and next to Cambridge. It was at Cambridge that I met your
     comrade's father--Sam Gardner, I mean. He was rather wild in
     his college days and to tell you the truth, I never cared to
     keep up with him much--he had such very rowdy friends. My
     mother died while I was at Cambridge and in his later years
     your grandfather married again--his housekeeper--and rather
     muddled his affairs, because at one time he was quite well
     off.

     After I was ordained he purchased for me the advowson of
     this living. All that came to me from his estate, however,
     was a sum of about eleven thousand pounds. This used to
     bring me in about five hundred pounds a year, and in
     addition to that was the fluctuating two hundred and fifty
     pounds income from my benefice. I took about three thousand
     pounds out of my capital to pay the debts you ran up, to
     article you to Mr. Praed; and, I must admit, to get my
     "Tales from Taliessin" and "Legends of the Welsh Saints"
     privately printed at Cardiff. I am afraid I wasted much good
     money on the desire to see my Cymraeg studies in print.

     Well: there I am! with about eight or nine thousand pounds
     to leave. I have not altered my will--leaving it all to you,
     subject to an annuity of £50 a year to your faithful Nannie.
     I was projecting an alteration in case of your death, when
     you most happily returned. I may live another ten years yet.
     You have put new life into me. One charge, however, I was
     going to have laid on you; while you were with me I could
     not bear to speak of these matters. If at any time after I'm
     gone you should come across your unhappy mother and find her
     in distressed circumstances, I bid you provide for her, but
     how much, I leave entirely to your judgment. Meantime, here
     I am with an income of nearly £700 a year. I live very
     simply, as you see, but I give away a good deal in local
     charity. The people are getting better wages now; in any
     case they are usually most ungrateful. I feel I should be
     happier if I diverted some of this alms-giving to you. You
     must find this preparatory life very expensive. You must let
     me send you twenty-five pounds every half-year for pocket
     money. Here is a cheque on the South Wales Bank for the
     first instalment. And remember, if you are in _any_
     difficulty about your career that a little money can get
     over do not hesitate to apply to me.

                           Your loving father,
                           HOWEL VAUGHAN WILLIAMS.

     P.S. I have taken five days to write this but see how steady
     the handwriting is. It is a pleasure to me to look on my own
     handwriting again. And I feel I owe it all to you! I also
     forgot in the body of the letter to tell you one curious
     thing. You know we are here on the borders of an interesting
     vein of limestone which runs all round the coal beds. I dare
     say you remember as a boy of fifteen or so spraining your
     ankle in Griffith's Hole? Well Griffith's Hole turns out to
     be the entrance into a wonderful cave in the limestone.
     Hither came the other day a party of scientific men who
     think that majestic first chapter of Genesis to be a
     Babylonian legend! It appears they discovered or thought
     they discovered the remains of Ancient man in Griffith's
     Hole. I invited them to tea at the Vicarage and amongst them
     was a very learned gentleman quite as wise as but less
     aggressive than the others. He was known as "Professor
     Rossiter"; and commenting on the similarity of my name with
     that of a "very agreeable young gentleman" whom he had
     recently seen in Gower, it turned out that you were an
     acquaintance of his. He thinks it a great pity that you are
     reading for the Bar and wishes you had taken up Science
     instead. At any rate he hopes you will go and see him in
     London one day--No. 1 Park Crescent. Portland Place.

                                          H. V. W.

Several times in reading this letter the tears stood in David's
eyes. So much trust and kindness made him momentarily sorry at the
double life he was leading. If it were possible to establish the
death of the wastrel he was personating he would perhaps allow his
"father" to live on in this new-found happiness; but if the real
D.V.W. were alive some effort must be made to help him out of the
slough--perhaps to bring him back. He would try to find out through
Frank Gardner.

Some time before Vivie Warren had taken her departure, she had left
behind in Honoria Fraser's temporary care a Power of Attorney duly
executed in favour of David Vavasour Williams; and reciprocally
D.V.W. had executed another in favour of Vivien Warren. Both these
documents lay securely in the little safe that David had had fitted
into the wall of his sitting-room in Fig Tree Court. Also David had
opened an account in his own name after he got back from Wales, at
the Temple Bar Branch of the C. &. C. Bank. Into this he now paid
the cheque for twenty-five pounds which his father had sent as
pocket money.

A few days afterwards, Vivie Warren reappeared--in spirit--and
indited a letter to Frank Gardner's agents in Cape Town. She was
careful to give no address at the head of the letter and to post it
at Victoria Station. In it she said she was starting on a tour
abroad, but asked him to do what he could to trace the boy who had
lain so grievously ill in the hospital at Colesberg. Had he
recovered after the Boers had taken Colesberg? As a rumour had
reached her that he had, and had even returned to England. She
wanted to know, and if they ever met again would tell him why.
Meanwhile if he got any news would he address it to _her_, care of
Honoria Fraser, Queen Anne's Mansions, St. James's Park; as her own
address would be quite uncertain for the present. Or it would do
quite as well if he wrote to Praddy; but _not_ to his father, which
might only needlessly agitate the old clergyman down in Wales, whom
Vivie by an unexpected chance had come to know.

The first result of this letter a year later was a statement of
Frank's belief, almost certainty, that his acquaintance of the
hospital _had_ died and been buried while the Boers held possession
of Colesberg; and that indeed was the utmost that was ever learnt
about the end of the ill-fated son of Howel Vaughan Williams and
Mary his wife, who were wedded in sunshine and with fair prospects
of happiness in the early summer of 1874.

The new-born David Vavasour Williams having by November settled all
these details, having arranged to pay the very modest rent of
fifty-five pounds for his three rooms at Fig Tree Court, and
twenty-five pounds a year to the housekeeper who was to "do" for him
and another gentleman on the same floor--a gentleman who was most
anxious to be chummy with the new tenant of the opposite chambers
but whose advances were firmly though civilly kept at bay--having
likewise passed his preliminary examination (since he could not avow
that inside his clothes he was a third wrangler), having satisfied
his two "godfathers" of the Bar that he was a fit person to
recommend to the Benchers; having arranged to read with a barrister
in chambers, and settled all other preliminaries of importance:
decided that he would pay an afternoon call on the Rossiters in
Portland Place and see how the land lay there.

Already a strange exhilaration was spreading over David's mind. Life
was not twice but ten times more interesting than it had appeared to
the prejudiced eyes of Vivien Warren. It was as though she--he--had
passed through some magic door, gone through the looking-glass and
was contemplating the same world as the one Vivie had known
for--shall we say fifteen?--years, but a world which viewed from a
different standpoint was quite changed in proportions, in colour, in
the conjunction of events. It was a world in which everything was
made smooth and easy before the semblance of manhood. What a joy to
be rid of skirts and petticoats! To be able to run after and leap on
to an omnibus, to wear the same hat day after day just stuck on top
of her curly head. Not, perhaps, to change her clothes, between her
uprising and her retirement to bed, unless she were going out to
dine. No simpering. No need to ask favours. No compliments. It is
true she felt awkward in the presence of women, not quite the same,
even with Honoria. But with men. What a difference! She felt she had
never really known men before. At first the frank speech, the
expletives, the smoking-room stories made her a little uncomfortable
and occasionally called forth an irrepressible blush. But this was
not to her disadvantage. It made her seem younger, and created a
good impression on her tutors and acquaintances. "A nice modest boy,
fresh from the country--pity to lead him astray--won't preserve his
innocence long--" was the vaguely defined impression, contact with
her--him, I mean--made on most decent male minds. Many a lad comes
up from the country to commence his career in London who knew far
less than the unfortunate Vivie had been compelled to know of the
shady side of life; who is compelled to lead a somewhat retired life
by straitness of means; whose determination towards probity and
regularity of life is respected by the men of law among whom he
finds himself.

But David having decided--he did not quite know why--to pursue his
acquaintance with Professor Rossiter; having written to ask if he
might do so (as a matter of fact he frequently saw Rossiter walking
across the gardens of New Square to go to the museum of the Royal
College of Surgeons: he recollected him immediately but Rossiter did
not reciprocate, being absent-minded); and having received a card
from "Linda Rossiter" to say they would be at home throughout the
winter on Thursdays, between 4 and 6: went on one of those Thursdays
and made definite progress with the great friendship of his life.




CHAPTER VI

THE ROSSITERS


The Rossiters' house in Park Crescent was at the northern end of
Portland Place, and its high-walled garden--the stables that were
afterwards to become a garage--and Michael Rossiter's long,
glass-roofed studio-laboratory--abutted on one of those quiet,
deadly-respectable streets at the back that are called after Devon
or Dorset place names.

The house is now a good deal altered and differently numbered, a
portion of it having been destroyed in one of the 1917 air-raids,
when the Marylebone Road was strewn with its broken glass for twenty
yards. But in the winter of 1901-2 and onwards till 1914 it was a
noted centre of social intercourse between Society and Science. The
Rossiters were well enough off--he made quite two thousand a year
out of his professorial work and his books, and her income which was
£5,000 when she first married had risen to £9,000 after they had
been married ten years; through the increase in value of Leeds town
property. Mrs. Rossiter had had two children, but were both dead,
her facile tears were dried, she satisfied her maternal instinct by
the keeping of three pug dogs which her husband secretly detested.
She also had a scarlet-and-blue macaw and two cockatoos and a
Persian cat; but these last her husband liked or tolerated for their
colour or their biological interest; only, as in the case of the
dogs, he objected (though seldom angrily, out of consideration for
his wife's feelings) to their being so messily and inopportunely
fed.

Linda Rossiter was liable to lose her pets as she had lost her two
children by alternating days of forgetfulness with weeks of lavish
over-attention. But as she readily gave way to tears on the least
remonstrance, Michael in the course of eleven years of married life
remonstrated as little as possible. A clever, tactful parlour-maid
and two good housemaids, a manservant who was devoted to the
"professor" and a taxidermist who assisted him in his experiments
did the rest in keeping the big house tolerably tidy and
presentable. Rossiter himself was too intent on the stars, the gases
of decomposition, the hidden processes of life, miscegenation in
star-fish, microbic diseases in man, beasts, birds and bees, the
glands of the throat, the suprarenal capsules and the chemical
origin of life to care much for æsthetics, for furniture and house
decoration. He was the third son of an impoverished Northumbrian
squire who on his part cared only for the more barbarous
field-sports, and when he could take his mind off them believed that
at some time and place unspecified Almighty God had dictated the
English bible word for word, had established the English Church and
had scrupulously prescribed the functions and limitations of woman.
His wife--Michael Rossiter's tenderly-loved mother--had died from a
neglected prolapsus of the womb, and the old rambling house in
Northumberland situated in superb scenery, had in its furniture
grown more and more hideous to the eye as early and mid-Victorian
fashions and ideals receded and modern taste shook itself free from
what was tawdry, fluffy, stuffy, floppy, messy, cheaply imitative,
fringed and tasselled and secretive.

Michael himself from sheer detestation of the surroundings under
which he had grown to manhood favoured the uncovered, the naked wood
or stone or slate, the bare floor, the wooden settee or
cane-bottomed chair, the massive side-board, the bare mantelpiece
and distempered wall. On the whole, their house in Portland Place
satisfied tolerably well the advanced taste in domestic scenery of
1901. But your eye was caught at once by the additions made by Mrs.
Rossiter. Linda conceived it was her womanly mission to lighten the
severity of Michael's choice in furniture and decorations. She
introduced rickety and expensive screens that were easily knocked
over; photographs in frames which toppled at a breath; covers on
every flat surface that could be covered--occasional tables, tops of
grand pianos. If she did not put frills round piano legs, she placed
tasselled poufs about the drawing-room that every short-sighted
visitor fell over, and used large bows of slightly discoloured
ribbon to mask unneeded brackets. In the reception rooms
food-bestrewn parrot stands were left where they ought never to be
seen; and there were gilt-wired parrot cages; baskets for the pugs
lined with soiled shawls; absurd ornaments, china cats with
exaggerated necks, alabaster figures of stereotyped female beauty
and flowerpot stands of ornate bamboo. She loved portières, and she
would fain have mitigated the bareness of the panelled or
distempered walls; only that here her husband was firm. She
unconsciously mocked the few well-chosen, well-placed pictures on
the walls (which she itched to cover with a "flock" paper) by
placing in the same room on bamboo easels that matched the
be-ribboned flower-stands pastel, crayon, or _gouache_ studies of
the worst possible taste.

Michael's library alone was free from her improvements, though it
was sometimes littered with her work-bags or her work. She had long
ago developed the dreadful mistake that it "helped" Michael at his
work if she brought hers (perfectly futile as a rule) there too. "I
just sit silently in his room, my dear, and stitch or knit something
for poor people in Marrybone--I'm told you mayn't say Mary-le-bone.
I feel it _helps_ Michael to know I'm there, but of course I don't
interrupt him at his _work_."

As a matter of fact she did, confoundedly. But fortunately she soon
grew sleepy or restless. She would yawn, as she believed "prettily,"
but certainly noisily; or she would wonder "how time was going," and
of course her twenty-guinea watch never went, or if it was going was
seldom within one hour of the actual time. Or she would sneeze six
times in succession--little cat-like sneezes that were infinitely
disturbing to a brain on the point of grasping the solution of a
problem. Throughout the winter months she had a little cough. Oh no,
you needn't think I'm preparing the way for decease through
phthisis--it was one of those "kiffy" coughs due in the main to
acidity--too many sweet things in her diet, too little exercise. She
_thought_ she coughed with the greatest discretion but to the jarred
nerves of her husband a few hearty bellows or an asthmatic wheeze
would have been preferable to the fidgety, marmoset-like sounds that
came from under a lace handkerchief. Sometimes he would raise his
eyes to speak sharply; but at the sight of the mild gaze that met
his, the perfect belief that she was a soothing presence in this
room of hard thinking and close writing--this superb room with its
unrivalled library that he owed to the use of her wealth, his angry
look would soften and he would return smile for smile.

Linda though a trifle fretful on occasion, especially with servants,
a little petulant and huffy with a sense of her own dignity and
importance as a rich woman, was completely happy in her marriage.
She had never regretted it for one hour, never swerved from the
conviction that she and Michael were a perfect match--he, tall,
stalwart, black-haired and strong; she "petite"--she loved the
French adjective ever since it had been applied to her at
Scarborough by a sycophantic governess--petite--she would repeat,
blonde, plump, or better still "potelée" (the governess had later
suggested, when she came to tea and hoped to be asked to stay)
_potelée_, blue-eyed and pink-cheeked. Dresden china and all the
stale similes applied to a type of little woman of whom the modern
world has grown intolerant.

It was therefore into this _milieu_ that David found himself
introduced one Thursday at the end of November, 1901. He had walked
the short distance from Great Portland Street station. It was a fine
day with a red sunset, and a lemon-coloured, thin moon-crescent
above the sunset. The trees and bushes of Park Crescent were a
background of dull blue haze. The surface of the broad roads was dry
and polished, so his neat, patent-leather boots would still be fit
for drawing-room carpets.

A footman in a very plain livery--here Michael was firm--opened the
massive door. David passed between some statuary of too frank a
style for Linda's modest taste and was taken over by a butler of
severe aspect who announced him into the great drawing-room as Mr.
David Williams.

He recognized Rossiter at once, standing up with a tea-cup and
saucer, and presumed that a fluffy, much be-furbelowed little lady
at the main tea-table was Mrs. Rossiter, since she wore no hat.
There was besides a rather alarming concourse of men and women of
the world as he kept his eyes firmly fixed on Mrs. Rossiter for his
immediate goal.

Rossiter met him half-way, shook hands cordially and introduced him
to his wife who bowed with one of her "sweet" looks. For the moment
David did not interest her. She was much more interested in trying
to give an impression of profundity to Lady Feenix who was
commenting on the professor's discoveries of the strange properties
of the thyroid gland. A few introductions were effected--Lady
Towcester, Lady Flower, Miss Knipper-Totes, Lady Dombey, Mr.
Lacrevy, Professor Ray Lankester, Mr. and Mrs. Gosse--and naturally
for the most part David only half caught their names while they,
without masking their indifference, closed their ears to his ("Some
student or other from his classes, I suppose--rather nicely dressed,
rather too good-looking for a young man"); and Rossiter, who had
been interrupted first by Mrs. Rossiter asking him to observe that
Lady Dombey had nothing on her plate, and secondly by David's
entrance, resumed his discourse. Goodness knew that he didn't _want_
to discourse on these occasions, but Society expected it of him.
There were quite twenty--twenty-two--people present and most of
them--all the women--wanted to go away and say four hours
afterwards:

"We were (I was) at the Rossiters this afternoon, and the Professor
was fascinating" ("great," "profoundly interesting," "shocking, my
dear," "scandalous," "disturbing," "illuminating," "more-than-usually-
enthralling-only-she-_would_-keep-interrupting-why-_is_-she-such-a-fool?")
according to the idiosyncrasy of the diner-out. "He talked to us
about the thyroid gland--I don't believe poor Bob's got one, between
ourselves--and how if you enlarged it or reduced it you'd adjust
people's characters to suit the needs of Society; and all about
chimpanzi's blood--I believe he _vivisects_ half through the night
in that studio behind the house--being the same as ours; and then
Ray Lankester and Chalmers Mitchell argued about the cæca--cæcums,
you know--something to do with appendicitis--of the mammalia, and
altogether we had a high old time--I _always_ learn something on
their Thursdays."

Well: Rossiter resumed his description of an experiment he was
making--quite an everyday one, of course, for there were at least
three men present to whom he wasn't going to give away clues
prematurely. An experiment on the motor biallaxis of dormice.

[Mrs. Rossiter had six months previously bought a dormouse in a cage
at a bazaar, and after idolizing it for a week had forgotten all
about it. Her husband had rescued it half starved; his assistant had
fed it up in the laboratory, and they had tried a few experiments on
it with painless drugs with astonishing results.]

The recital really was interesting and entirely outside the
priggishness of Science, but it was marred in consecutiveness and
simplicity by Mrs. Rossiter's interruptions. "Michael dear, Lady
Dombey's cup!" Or: "Mike, could you cut that cake and hand it
round?" Or, if she didn't interrupt her husband she started stories
and side-issues of her own in a voice that was quite distinctly
heard, about a new stitch in crochet she had seen in the _Queen_, or
her inspection of the East Marrybone soup kitchen.

However when all had taken as much tea and cakes and _marrons
glacés_ as they cared for--David was so shy that he had only one cup
of tea and one piece of tea-cake--the large group broke up into five
smaller ones. The few gradually converged, and dropping all nonsense
discussed biology like good 'uns, David listening eager-eyed and
enthralled at the marvels just beginning to peep out of the
dissecting and vivisecting rooms and chemical laboratories in the
opening years of the Twentieth century. Then one by one they all
departed; but as David was going too Rossiter detained him by a
kindly pressure on the arm--a contact which sent a half-pleasant,
half-disagreeable thrill through his nerves.

"Don't hurry away unless you really _are_ pressed for time. I want
to show you some of my specimens and the place where I work."

David followed him--after taking his leave of Mrs. Rossiter who
accepted his polite sentences--a little stammered--with a slightly
pompous acquiescence--followed him to the library and then through a
curtained door down some steps into a great studio-laboratory,
provided (behind screens) with washing places, and full of
mysteries, with cupboards and shelves and further rooms beyond and a
smell of chloride of lime combined with alcoholic preservatives and
undefined chemicals. After a tour round this domain in which David
was only slightly interested--for lack of the right education
and imagination--so far he--or--she had only the mind of a
mathematician--Rossiter led him back into the library, drew out
chairs, indicated cigarettes--even whiskey and soda if he wanted
it--David declined--and then began to say what was at the back of
his mind:--

"We met first in the train, the South Wales Express, you remember? I
fancy you told me then that you had been in South Africa, in this
bungled war, and had been either wounded or ill in some way. In fact
you went so far as to say you had had 'necrosis of the jaw,' a thing
I politely doubted because whatever it was it has left no
perceptible scar. Of course it's damned impertinent of me to
cross-examine you at all, or to ask _why_ you went to and why you
left South Africa. But I don't mind confessing you inspire me with a
good deal of interest.

"Now the other day--as you know--I made the acquaintance of your
father in Wales--at Pontystrad. I told him I had shown a young
fellow some of those Gower caves and how his name was--like your
father's, 'Williams.' Of course we soon came to an understanding.
Then your father spoke of you in _high_ praise. What a delightful
nature was yours, how considerate and kind you were--don't blush,
though I admit it becomes you--Well you can pretty well guess how he
went on. But what interested me particularly was his next
admission: how different you were as a lad--rather more than the
ordinary wild oats--eh? And how completely an absence in South
Africa had changed you. You must forgive my cheek in dissecting your
character like this. My excuse is that you yourself had rather
vaguely referred to some wound or blood poisoning or operation, on
the jaw or the throat. Not to beat about the bush any more, the idea
came into my mind that _if_ in some way the knife or the enemy's
bullet had interfered with your thyroid gland--Twig what I mean? I
mean, that if your old man has not been exaggerating and that the
difference between the naughty boy whom he sent up to London
in--what was it? 1896?--and the perfectly behaved, good sort of chap
that you are _now_ is no more than what usually happens when young
men lose their cubbishness, _why_--_why_--do you take me?--I ask
myself whether the change had come about through some interference
with the thyroid gland. Do you understand? And I thought, seeing how
intensely interesting this research has become, you might have told
me more about it. Just what _did_ happen to you; where you were
wounded, who attended to you, what operation was performed on the
throat--only the rum thing is there seems to be no scar--well: now
_you_ help me out, that is unless you feel more inclined to say,
'What the _hell_ does it matter to _you_?'"...

David by this time has grown scarlet with embarrassment and
confusion. But he endeavoured to meet the situation.

"My character _has_ changed during the last five years, and
especially so since I came back from South Africa. But I am quite
sure it was not due to any operation, on the throat or anywhere
else. I really don't know _why_ I told you that silly falsehood in
the train--about necrosis of the jaw. The fact is that when I was in
hospital--at--Colesberg, a friend of mine in the same ward used--to
chaff me--and say I was going to have necrosis. I had got knocked
over one day--by--the--wind of a shell and thought I was done for,
but it really was next to nothing. P'raps I had a dose of fever on
top. At any rate they kept me in hospital, and one morning the
doctors disappeared and the Boers marched in and when I got well
enough I managed to escape and get away to--er--Cape Town and so
returned--with some money--my friend Frank Gardner lent me." (At
this stage the sick-at-heart Vivie was saying to herself, "_What_ an
account I'm laying up for Frank to honour when he comes back--if he
_does_ come back.") "I don't know _why_ I tell you all this, except
that I ought never to have misled you at the start. But _if_ you are
a kind and good man"--David's voice broke here--"You will forget all
about it and not upset my father, I can _assure_ you I haven't done
_anything_ really wrong. I haven't deserted--some day--perhaps--I
can tell you all about it. But at present all that South African
episode is just a horrid dream--I was more sinned against than
sinning" (tears were rather in the voice at this stage). "I want to
forget all about it--and settle down and vex my father no more. I
want to read for the Bar--a soldier's life is the very _opposite_ to
what I should choose if I were a free agent. But you will trust me,
won't you? You will believe me when I say I've done _nothing_ wrong,
nothing that you, if you knew all the facts, would call wrong...?"

Speech here trailed off into emotion. Despite the severest
self-restraint the bosom rose and fell. A few tears trickled down
the smooth cheeks--it was an ingratiating boy on the verge of
manhood that Rossiter saw before him. He hastened to say:

"My _dear_ chap! Don't say another word, unless you like to
blackguard me for my impertinence in putting these questions. I
_quite_ understand. We'll consider the whole thing erased from our
memories. Go on studying for the Bar with all your might, if you
must take up so barren a profession and won't become my pupil in
biology--Great openings, I can tell you, coming now in that
direction." (A pause.)

"But if it's of any interest to you, just come here as often as you
like in your spare time--either to tea with Mrs. Rossiter or to see
me at work on my experiments. I've taken a great liking to you, if
you'll allow me to say so. I think there's good stuff in you. A
young man reading for the Bar in London is none the worse for a few
friends. He must often feel pretty lonely on a Sunday, for example.
And he may also--now I'm going to be impertinent and paternal
again--he may also pick up undesirable acquaintances, male--and
female. Don't you get feeling lonely, with your home far away in
Wales. Consider yourself free of this place at any rate, and my wife
and I can introduce you to some other people you might like to know.
I might introduce you to Mark Stansfield the Q.C. Do you know any
one in London, by the bye?"

"Oh yes," said David, smiling with all but one tear dried on a still
coloured cheek. "I know Honoria Fraser--I know Mr. Praed the
architect--"

"The A.R.A.? Of course; you or your father said you had
been his pupil. H'm. Praed. Yes, I visualize him. Rather a
dilettante--whimsical--I didn't like what I heard of him at one
time. However it's no affair of mine. And Honoria Fraser! She's
simply one of the best women I know. It's curious she wasn't
here--At least I didn't see her--this afternoon. She's a friend of
my wife's. I knew her when she was at Newnham. She had a great
friend--what was it? Violet? No, Vera? Vivien--yes that was it,
_Vivien_ Warren. Of course! Why that business she started for women
in the City somewhere is called _Fraser and Warren_. She was always
wanting to bring this Vivien Warren here. Said she had such a pretty
colouring. I own I rather like to see a pretty woman. But she didn't
come" (pulls at his pipe and thrusts another cigarette on David).
"Went abroad. Seemed rather morose. Some one who came with Honoria
said she had a bad mother, and Honoria very rightly shut him up. By
the bye, _where_ and _how_ did you come to meet Honoria first?"

(David was on the point of saying--he was so unstrung--"Why we were
at Newnham together." Then resolved to tell another whopper--Indeed
I am told there is a fascination in certain circumstances about
lying--and replied): "Vivien Warren was my cousin. She was a
Vavasour on her mother's side--from South Wales--and my mother was a
Vavasour too--" And as the disguised Vivie said this, some inkling
came into her mind that there _was_ a real relationship between
Catharine Warren _née_ Vavasour and the Mary Vavasour who was
David's mother. A spasm of joy flashed through her at the
possibility of her story being in some slight degree true.

"I see," said Rossiter, satisfied, and feeling now that the
interview had lasted long enough and that there would be just time
to glance at his assistant's afternoon work before he dressed for
dinner....

"Well, old chap. Good-bye for the present. Come often and see us and
look upon me--I must be fifteen years older than you are--What,
_twenty-four_? Impossible! You don't look a day older than
twenty--in fact, if you hadn't told me you'd been in South
Africa--However as I was saying, look on me as _in loco parentis_
while you _are_ in London. I'll show you the way out into the hall.
Shall they call you a cab? No? You're quite right. It's a splendid
night for January. Where do you live? Here, write it down in my
address book.... '7 Fig Tree Court, Temple'--What a jolly address!
Are there fig trees in the Temple ... still? P'raps descended from
cuttings or layers the poor Templars brought from the Holy Land."


David returned to Fig Tree Court and his studies of criminology. But
his body and mind thrilled with the experiences of the afternoon;
and the musty records in works of repellent binding and close,
unsympathetic print of nineteenth century forgery, poisoning,
assaults-on-the-person, and cruelty-to-children cases for once
failed to hold his close attention. He sat all through the evening
after a supper of bread and cheese and ginger beer in his snug,
small room, furnished principally with well-filled book-shelves. The
room had a glowing fire and a green-shaded reading lamp. He sat
staring beyond his law books at visions, waking dreams that came and
went. The dangers of exposure that opened before him were in these
dreams, but there were other mind-pictures that filled his life with
a glow of colour. How different from the drab horizons that
encircled poor Vivie Warren less than a year ago! Poor Vivie, whom
even FitzJohn's Avenue at Hampstead had rejected, who had long since
been dropped--no doubt on account of rumours concerning her
mother--by the few acquaintances she had made at Cambridge, who had
parents living in South Kensington, Bayswater, and Bloomsbury. Here
was Portland Place receiving her in her guise as David Williams with
open arms. Men and women looked at her kindly, interestedly, and she
could look back at them without that protective frown. At night she
could walk about the town, go to the theatre, stroll along the
Embankment and attract no man's offensive attentions. She could
enter where she liked for a meal, a cup of tea, frequent the museum
of the Royal College of Surgeons when she would without waiting for
a "ladies" day; stop to look at a street fight, cause no sour looks
if she entered a smoking compartment on the train, mingle with the
man-world unquestioned, unhindered, unnoticed, exciting at most a
pleasant off-hand camaraderie due to her youth and good looks.

Should she go on with the bold adventure? A thousand times yes!
David should break no law in Vivie's code of honour, do real wrong
to no one; but Vivie should see the life best worth living in London
from a man's standpoint.

David however must be armed at every point and have his course
clearly marked out before his contemplation. He must steep himself
in the geography of South Africa--Why not get Rossiter to propose
him as a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society? That _would_ be a
lark because they wouldn't admit women as members: they had refused
Honoria Fraser. David must read up--somewhere--the history of the
South African War as far as it went. He had better find out
something about the Bechuanaland Police Force; how as a member of
such a force he could have drifted as far south as the vicinity of
Colesberg; how thereabouts he could have got sick enough--he
certainly would say nothing more about a wound--to have been put
into hospital. He must find out how he could have escaped from the
Boers and come back to England without getting into difficulties
with the military or the Colonial Office or whoever had any kind of
control over the members of the Bechuanaland Border Police....

But the whole South African episode had better be dropped. Rossiter,
after his appeal, would set himself to forget and ignore it. It must
be damped down in the poor old father's mind as of relative
unimportance--after all, his father was a recluse who did not have
many visitors ... by the bye, he must remember to write on the
morrow and explain why he could not come down for Christmas or the
New Year ... would promise a good long visit in the Easter holidays
instead--Must remember that resolution to learn up some Welsh. What
a nuisance it was that you couldn't buy anywhere in London or in
South Wales any book about modern conversation in Welsh. The sort of
Welsh you learnt in the old-fashioned books, which were all that
could be got, was Biblical language--Some one had told David that if
you went into Smithfield Market in the early morning you might meet
the Welsh farmers and stock-drivers who had come up from Wales
during the night and who held forth in the Cymric tongue over their
beasts. But probably their language was such as would shock
Nannie.... Supposing Frank Gardner did come to England? In that case
it might be safer to confide in Frank. He was harum-scarum, but he
was chivalrous and he pitied Vivie. Besides he was a prime
appreciator of a lark. Should she even tell Rossiter? No, of
_course_ not. That was just one of the advantages of being "David."
As "David" she could form a sincere and inspiring friendship with
Rossiter which would be utterly beyond her reach as "Vivie." How
pale beside the comradeship of Honoria now appeared the hand-grips,
the hearty male free-masonry of a man like Rossiter. How ungrateful
however even to make such an admission to herself....

At present the only people who knew of her prank and guessed or knew
her purpose were Honoria and Bertie Adams. Honoria! what a noble
woman, what a true friend. Somehow, now she was David, she saw
Honoria in a different light. Poor Norie! She too had her wistful
leanings, her sorrows and disappointments. What a good thing it
would be if her mother decided to die--of course she would, could,
never say any such thing to Norie--to die and set free Honoria to
marry Major Petworth Armstrong! She felt Norie still hankered after
him, but perhaps kept him at bay partly because of her mother's
molluscous clingings--No! she wouldn't even sneer at Lady Fraser.
Lady Fraser had been one of the early champions of Woman's rights.
Very likely it was a dread of Vivie's sneers and disappointment that
had mainly kept back Norie from accepting Major Armstrong's
advances. Well, when next they met she--Vivie--or better still
David--would set that right.




CHAPTER VII

HONORIA AGAIN


                              7, Fig Tree Court, Temple.
                                     _March_ 20, 1902.


     DEAR HONORIA,--

     I am going down to spend Easter with my people in South
     Wales. Before I leave I should so very much like a long talk
     with you where we can talk freely and undisturbed. That is
     impossible at the Office for a hundred reasons, especially
     now that Beryl Claridge has taken to working early in her
     new-found zeal, while Bertie Adams deems it his duty to stay
     late. I am--really, truly--grieved to hear that your mother
     is so ill again. I would not ask to meet her--even if she
     was well enough to receive people--because she does not know
     me and when one is as ill as she is, the introduction to a
     stranger is a horrid jar. But if you _could_ fit in say an
     hour's detachment from her side--is it "bed-side" or is she
     able to get up?--and could receive me in your own
     sitting-room, why then we could have that full and free talk
     I should like on your affairs and on mine and on the joint
     affairs of _Fraser and Warren_.

                               Yours sincerely,
                                          D. V. W.


     DEAR DAVID,--

     Come by all means. The wish for a talk is fully reciprocated
     on my side. Mother generally tries to sleep in the afternoon
     between three and six, and a Nurse is then with her.

                               Yours sincerely,
                                          H. F.

"Mr. David Williams wishes to see you, Miss," said a waiter,
meeting Honoria on a Thursday afternoon, as she was emerging into
their tiny hall from her mother's room.

"Show him up, please.... Ah _there_ you are, _David_. We must both
talk rather low as mother is easily waked. Come into my study;
fortunately it is at the other end of the flat."

        *       *       *       *       *

They reach the study, and Honoria closes the door softly but firmly
behind them.

"We never do kiss as a rule, having long ago given up such a messy
form of greeting; but certainly we wouldn't under these
circumstances lest we could be seen from the opposite windows and
thought to be 'engaged'; but though I may seem a little frigid in
greeting you, it is only because of the clothes you are
wearing'--You understand, don't you--?"

"Quite, dearest. We cannot be too careful. Besides we long ago
agreed to be modern and sanitary in our manners."

"Won't you smoke?"

"Well, perhaps it would be more restful," said David, "more manly;
but as a matter of fact of late I have been rather 'off' smoking. It
is very wasteful, and as far as I am concerned it never produced
much effect--either way--on the nerves. Still, it gives one a nice
manly flavour. I always liked the smell of a smoking-room.... And
your mother: how is she?"

"Very bad, I fear. The doctor tells me she can't last much longer,
and hypocritical as the phrase sounds I couldn't wish her to, unless
these pains can be mitigated, and this dreadful distress in
breathing.... I wonder if some day _I_ shall be like that, and if
behind my back a daughter will be saying she couldn't wish me to
live much longer, unless, etc. I shall miss her _frightfully_, if
she does die.... Armstrong has been more than kind. He has got a
woman's heart for tenderness. He thinks every day of some fresh
palliative until the doctors quite dislike him. Fortunately his
kindness gives mother a fleeting gleam of pleasure. She wants me to
marry him--I don't know, I'm sure.... Whilst she's so bad I don't
feel I could take any interest in love-making--and I suppose we
_should_ make love in a perfunctory way--We're all of us so bound by
conventions. We try to feel dismal at funerals, when often the
weather is radiant and the ride down to Brookwood most exhilarating.
And love-making is supposed to go with marriage ... heigh-ho! What
should you say if I _did_ marry--Major Armstrong...? Did you ever
hear of such a ridiculous name as Petworth? I should have to call
him 'Pet' and every one would think I had gone sentimental in middle
age. How _can_ parents be so unthinking about Christian names? He
can't see the thing as I do; it is almost the only subject on which
he is 'huffy.' _You_ are the other, about which more anon. He says
the Petworth property meant _everything_ to the Armstrongs, to _his_
branch of the Armstrongs. But for that, they might have been any
other kind of Armstrong--it always kept him straight at school and
in the army, he says, to remember he was an Armstrong of Petworth.
They have held that poor little property (_I_ call it) alongside the
Egmonts and the Leconfields for three hundred years, though they've
been miserably poor. His second name is James--Petworth James
Armstrong. But he loathes being called 'Jimmy.'

"Of course, dear, I've no illusions. I'm not bad to look at--indeed
I sometimes quite admire my figure when I see myself after my bath
in the cheval glass--but I'm pretty well sure that one of the
factors in Pet's admiration for me was my income. Mother, it seems,
has a little of her own, from one of her aunts, and if the poor
darling is taken--though it is simply horrid considering that
_if_--only that she has talked so freely to Army--I think I like
'Army' far better than 'Pet'--Well I mean she's been trying to tell
him ever since he first came to call that when she is gone I shall
have, all told, in my own right, Five thousand a year. So I took the
first opportunity of letting _him_ know that Two thousand a year of
that would be held in reserve for the work of the firm and for the
Woman's Cause generally.... Look here, I won't babble on much
longer.... I know you're dying to make _me_ confidences.... We'll
ring for tea to be sent in here, and whilst the waiter is coming and
going--Don't they take _such_ a time about it, when they're _de
trop_?--we'll talk of ordinary things that can be shouted from the
_house tops_.

"I haven't been to the Office for three days. Does everything seem
to be going on all right?"

_David_: "Quite all right. Bertie Adams tries dumbly to express in
his eyes his determination to see the firm and me through all our
troubles and adventures. I wish I could convey a discreet hint to
him not to be so _blatantly_ discreet. If there were a Sherlock
Holmes about the place he would spot at once that Adams and I shared
a secret.... But about Beryl--" (Enter waiter....)

_Honoria_ (to waiter): "Oh--er--tea for two please. Remember it must
be China and the still-room maids _must_ see that the water has been
fresh-boiled. And buttered toast--or if you've got muffins...? You
have? Well, then muffins; and of course jam and cake. And--would you
mind--you always try, I know--bringing the things in very
quietly--here--? Because Lady Fraser is so easily waked..."

(The Swiss waiter goes out, firmly convinced that Honoria's anxiety
for her lady mother is really due to the desire that the mother
should not interrupt a flirtation and a clandestine tea.)

_Honoria_: "Well, about Beryl?"

_David_: "Beryl, I should say, is going to become a great woman of
business. But for that, and--I think--a curious streak of fidelity
to her vacillating architect ('How happy could I be with either,'
don't you know, _he_ seems to feel--just now they say he is living
steadily at Storrington with his wife No. 1, who is ill, poor
thing) ... but for that and this, I think Beryl would enjoy a
flirtation with me. She can't quite make me out, and my unwavering
severity of manner. Her cross-questioning sometimes is maddening--or
it might become so, but that with both of us--you and me--retiring
so much into the background she has to lead such a strenuous life
and see one after the other the more important clients. Of
course--here's the tea..."

(Brief interval during which the waiter does much unnecessary laying
out of the tea until Honoria says: "Don't let me keep you. I know
you are busy at this time. I will ring if we want anything.") David
continues: "Of course I come in for my share of the work after six.
On one point Beryl is firm; she doesn't mind coming at nine or at
eight or at half-past seven in the morning, but she _must_ be back
in Chelsea by half-past five to see her babies, wash them and put
them to bed. She has a tiny little house, she tells me, near
Trafalgar Square, and fortunately she's got an excellent and devoted
nurse, one of those rare treasures that questions nothing and is
only interested in the business in hand. She and a cook-general make
up the establishment. Before Mrs. Architect No. 1 became ill, Mr.
Architect used to visit her there pretty regularly, and is assumed
to be Mr. Claridge.... Well: to finish up about Beryl: I think
you--we--can trust her. She may be odd in her notions of morality,
but in finance or business she's as honest--as--a man."

"My dear Vivie--I mean David--what a strange thing for _you_ to
say! I suppose it is part of your make-up--goes with the clothes and
that turn-over collar, and the little safety pin through the tie--?"

_David_: "No, I said it deliberately. Men are mostly hateful things,
but I think in business they're more dependable than women--think
more about telling a lie or letting any one down. The point for you
to seize on is this--if you haven't noticed it already: that Beryl
has become an uncommonly good business woman. And what's more, my
dear, you've improved _her_ just as you improved _me_" (Honoria
deprecates this with a gesture, as she sits looking into the fire).
"Beryl's talk is getting ever so much less reckless. And she takes
jolly good care not to scandalize a client. She finds Adams--she
tells me--so severe at the least jest or personality that she only
talks to him now on business matters, and finds him a great
stand-by; and the other day she told Miss A.--as you call the senior
clerk--she ought to be ashamed of herself, bringing in a copy of the
_Vie Parisienne_. The way she settled Mrs. Gordon's affairs--you
remember, No. 3875 you catalogued the case--was masterly; and Mrs.
G. has insisted on paying 5 per cent. commission on the recovered
property. And it was Beryl who found out that leakage in the
'Variegated Tea Rooms' statement of accounts. I hadn't spotted it.
No. I think we needn't be anxious about Beryl, especially whilst I
am in Wales and you are giving yourself up--as you ought to do--to
your mother. But it's coming to _this_, Honoria--" (Enter waiter.
David says "Oh, damn," half audibly. Waiter is confirmed in his
suspicions, but as he likes Honoria immensely resolves to say
nothing about them in the Steward's room. She is such a kind young
lady. He explains he has come to take the tea things away, and
Honoria replies "Capital idea! Now, David, you'll be able to have
the whole table for your accounts!").... "It's coming to _this_,
Honoria," says David, clearing his throat, "that you will soon be
wanting not to be bothered any more with the affairs of _Fraser and
Warren_, and after I really get into the Law business I too shall
require to detach myself. Let us therefore be thankful that Beryl is
shaping so well. I rather think this summer you will have to get
more office accommodation and give her some more responsible women
to help her.... _Now_ finish what you were saying about Major
Armstrong."

_Honoria_: "Of _course_ I shall marry him some day. I suppose I felt
that the day after I first met him. But it amuses me to be under no
illusion. I am sure this is what happened two years ago--or whenever
it was he came back wounded from your favourite haunt, South Africa.
Michael Rossiter--who likes 'Army' enormously--I think they were at
school or college together--said to Linda, his wife: 'Here's
Armstrong. One of the best. Wants to marry. Wife must have a little
money, otherwise he'll have to go on letting Petworth Manor. And
here's Honoria Fraser, one of the finest women I've ever met.
Getting a little long in the tooth--or will be soon. Let's bring 'em
together and make a match of it.'

"So we are each convoked for a luncheon, with a projected
adjournment to Kew--which _you_ spoilt--and there it is. But joking
apart, 'Army' is a dear and I am sure by now he wants me even more
than my money--and I certainly want him. I'm rising thirty and I
long for children and don't want 'em to come to me too late in
life."

_David_: "You said he didn't like _me_..."

_Honoria_: "Oh that was half nonsense. When we all met last Sunday
at the Rossiters he became very jealous and suspicious. Asked who
was that whipper-snapper--I said you neither whipped nor snapped,
especially if kindly treated. He said then who was that Madonna
young man--a phrase it appears he'd picked up from Lord Cromer,
who used to apply it to every new arrival from the Foreign
Office--Armstrong was once his military secretary. I was surprised
to hear he thought you womanish--I spoke of your fencing,
riding,--was just going to add 'hockey,' and 'croquet': then
remembered they might be thought feminine pastimes, so referred to
your swimming. Military men always respect a good swimmer; I fancy
because many of them funk the water.... I was just going on to
explain that you were a cousin of a great friend of mine and helped
me in my business, when a commissionaire came from Quansions in a
hansom to say that mother was feeling very bad again. 'Army' and I
went back in the hansom, but I was crying a little and being a
gentleman he did not press his suit..."

Enter Lady Fraser's nurse on tiptoe. Says in a very hushed voice
"Major Armstrong has called, Miss Fraser. He came to ask about Lady
Fraser. I said if anything she was a bit better and had had a good
sleep. He then asked if he might see you."

_Honoria_: "Certainly. Would you mind showing him in here? It will
save my ringing for the waiter."

Enter Major Armstrong. At the sight of David he flushes and looks
fierce.

_Honoria_: "So glad you've come, dear Major. I hear mother has had a
good nap. I must go to her presently. You know David Vavasour
Williams?--Davy! You really _must_ leave out your second name! It
gets so fatiguing having to say it every time I introduce you."

Armstrong bows stiffly and David, standing with one well-shaped foot
in a neat boot on the curb of the fireplace, looks up and returns
the bow.

_Honoria_: "This won't do. You are two of my dearest friends, and
yet you hardly greet one another. I always determined from the age
of fifteen onwards I would never pass my life as men and women in a
novel do--letting misunderstandings creep on and on where fifty
words might settle them. _Army!_ You've often asked me to marry
you--or at least so I've understood your broken sentences. I never
refused you in so many words. Now I say distinctly 'Yes'--if you'll
have me. Only, you know quite well I can't actually marry you whilst
mother lies so ill..."

Major Armstrong, very red in the face, in a mixture of exultation,
sympathy and annoyance that the affairs of his heart are being
discussed before a whipper-snapper stranger--says: "_Honoria!_ Do
you _mean_ it? Oh..."

_Honoria_: "Of course I mean it! And if I drew back you could now
have a breach-of-promise-of-marriage action, with David as an
important witness. D.V.W.--who by the bye is a cousin of my
_greatest friend_--my friend for life, whether you like her--as you
ought to do--or not--Vivie Warren.... David is reading for the Bar;
and besides being your witness to what I have just said, might--if
you deferred your action long enough--be your Counsel.... Now look
here," (with a catch in the voice) "you two dear things. My nerves
are all to bits.... I haven't slept properly for nights and nights.
David, dear, if you _must_ talk any more business before you go down
to Wales, you must come and see me to-morrow.... Darling mother! I
can't _bear_ the thought you may not live to see my happiness."
(David discreetly withdraws without a formal good-bye, and as he
goes out and the firelight flickers up, sees Armstrong take Honoria
in his arms.)




CHAPTER VIII

THE BRITISH CHURCH


David had read hard all through Hilary term with Mr. Stansfield of
the Inner Temple; he had passed examinations brilliantly; he had
solved knotty problems in the legal line for _Fraser and Warren_,
and as already related he had begun to go out into Society. Indeed,
starting from the Rossiters' Thursdays and Praed's studio suppers,
he was being taken up by persons of influence who were pleased to
find him witty, possessed of a charming voice, of quiet but
unassailable manners. Opinions differed as to his good looks. Some
women proclaimed him as adorable, rather Sphynx-like, you know, but
quite fascinating with his well-marked eye-brows, his dark and curly
lashes, the rich warm tints of his complexion, the unfathomable grey
eyes and short upper lip with the down of adolescence upon it. Other
women without assigning any reason admitted he did not produce any
effect on their sensibility--they disliked law students, they said,
even if they were of a literary turn; they also disliked curates and
shopwalkers and sidesmen ... and Sunday-school teachers. Give them
_manly_ men; avowed soldiers and sailors, riders to hounds,
sportsmen, big game hunters, game-keepers, chauffeurs--the
chauffeur was becoming a new factor in Society, Bernard Shaw's
"superman"--prize-fighters, meat-salesmen--then you knew where you
were.

Similarly men were divided in their judgment of him. Some liked him
very much, they couldn't quite say why. Others spoke of him
contemptuously, like Major Armstrong had done. This was due partly
to certain women being inclined to run after him--and therefore to
jealousy on behalf of the professional lady-killer of the
military species--and partly to a vague feeling that he was
enigmatic--Sphynx-like, as some women said. He was too silent
sometimes, especially if the conversation amongst men tended towards
racy stories; he was sarcastic and nimble-witted when he did speak.
And he was not easily bullied. If he encountered an insolent person,
he gave full effect to his five feet eight inches, the look from his
grey eyes was unwavering as though he tacitly accepted the
challenge, there was an invisible rapier hanging from his left hip,
a poise of the body which expressed dauntless courage.

Honoria's stories of his skill in fencing, riding, swimming,
ball-games, helped him here. They were perfectly true or
sufficiently true--_mutatis mutandis_--and when put to the test
stood the test. David indeed found it well during this first season
in Town to hire a hack and ride a little in the Park--it only added
one way and another about fifty pounds to his outlay and impressed
certain of the Benchers who were beginning to turn an eye on him.
One elderly judge--also a Park rider--developed an almost
inconvenient interest in him; asked him to dinner, introduced him to
his daughters, and wanted to know a deal too much as to his position
and prospects.

On the whole, it was a distinct relief from a public position, from
this increasing number of town acquaintances, this broader and
broader track strewn with cunning pitfalls, to lock up his rooms and
go off to Wales for the Easter holidays. Easter was late that
year--or it has to be for the purpose of my story--and David was
fortunate in the weather and the temperature. If West Glamorganshire
had looked richly, grandiosely beautiful in full summer, it had an
exquisite, if quite different charm in early spring, in April. The
great trees were spangled with emerald leaf-buds; the cherries, tame
and wild, the black-thorn, the plums and pears in orchards and on
old, old, grey walls, were in full blossom of virgin white. The
apple trees in course of time showed pink buds. The gardens
were full of wall-flowers--the inhabited country smelt of
wall-flowers--purple flags, narcissi, hyacinths. The woodland was
exquisitely strewn with primroses. In the glades rose innumerable
spears of purple half-opened bluebells; the eye ranged over an
anemone-dotted sward in this direction; over clusters of smalt-blue
dog violets in another. Ladies'-smocks and cowslips made every
meadow delicious; and the banks of the lowland streams were
gorgeously gilded with king-cups. The mountains on fine days were
blue and purple in the far distance; pale green and grey in the
foreground. Under the April showers and sun-shafts they became
tragic, enchanted, horrific, paradisiac. Even the mining towns were
bearable--in the spring sunshine. If man had left no effort untried
to pile hideosity on hideosity, flat ugliness on nauseous squalor,
he had not been able to affect the arch of the heavens in its lucid
blue, all smokes and vapours driven away by the spring winds; he had
not been able to neutralize the vast views visible from the miners'
sordid, one-storeyed dwellings, the panorama of hill and plain, of
glistening water, towering peaks, and larch forests of emerald green
amid the blue-Scotch pines and the black-green yews.

David in previous letters, looking into his father's budget, had
shown him he could afford to keep a pony and a pony cart. This
therefore was waiting for him at the little station with the
gardener to drive. But in a week, David, already a good horseman,
had learnt to drive under the gardener's teaching, and then was able
to take his delighted father out for whole-day trips to revel in the
beauties of the scenery.

They would have with them a wicker basket containing an ample lunch
prepared by the generous hands of Bridget. They would stop at
some spot on a mountain pass; tether the pony, sit on a plaid
shawl thrown over a boulder, and feast their eyes on green
mountain-shoulders reared against the pale blue sky; or gaze across
ravines not unworthy of Switzerland. Or they would put up pony and
cart at some village inn, explore old battlemented churches and
churchyards with seventeenth and eighteenth century headstones, so
far more tasteful and seemly than the hideous death memorials of the
nineteenth century. And ever and again the old father, looking more
and more like a Druid, would recite that charming Spring song, the
104th Psalm; or fragments of Welsh poetry sounding very good in
Welsh--as no doubt Greek poetry does in properly pronounced Greek,
but being singularly bald and vague in its references to earth, sea,
sky and flora when translated into plain English.

David expressed some such opinions which rather scandalized his
father who had grown up in the conventional school of unbounded,
unreasoning reverence for the Hebrew, Greek and Keltic classics.
From that they passed to the great problems, the undeterminable
problems of the Universe; the awful littleness of men--mere lice,
perhaps, on the scurfy body of a shrinking, dying planet of a
fifth-rate sun, one of a billion other suns. The Revd. Howel like
most of the Christian clergy of all times of course never looked at
the midnight sky or gave any thought to the terrors and mysteries of
astronomy, a science so modern, in fact, that it only came into real
existence two or three hundred years ago; and is even now only taken
seriously by about ten thousand people in Europe and America. Where,
in this measureless universe--which indeed might only be one of
several universes--was God to be found? A God that had been upset by
the dietary of a small desert tribe, who fussed over burnt
sacrifices and the fat of rams at one time; at another objected to
censuses; at another and a later date wanted a human sacrifice to
placate his wrath; or who had washed out the world's fauna and flora
in a flood which had left no geological evidence to attest its
having taken place. "Did you ever think about the Dinosaurs,
father?" said David at the end of some such tirade--an outburst of
free-thinking which in earlier years might have upset that father to
wrath and angry protest, but which now for some reason only left him
dazed and absent-minded. (It was the Colonies that had done it, he
thought, and the studio talk of that dilettante architect. By and
bye, David would distinguish himself at the Bar, marry and settle
down, and resume the orthodox outlook of the English--or as he liked
to call it--the British Church.)

"The Dinosaurs, my boy? No. What were they?"

_David_: "The real Dragons, the Dragons of the prime, that swarmed
over England and Wales and Scotland, and Europe, Asia, and North
America--and I dare say Africa too. One of the most stupendous facts
of what you call 'creation,' though perhaps only one amongst many
skin diseases that have afflicted the planet--Well the Dinosaurs
went on developing and evolving and perfecting--so Rossiter
says--for three million years or so--Then they were scrap-heaped.
What

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