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The Parts Men Play

by Beverley Baxter · English · Gutenberg #17481 · 606,914 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Parts Men Play

Author: Beverley Baxter


        
Release date: January 9, 2006 [eBook #17481]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17481

Credits: E-text prepared by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PARTS MEN PLAY ***


E-text prepared by Al Haines



THE PARTS MEN PLAY

by

ARTHUR BEVERLEY BAXTER

Author of "The Blower of Bubbles"

With Foreword by Lord Beaverbrook







McClelland & Stewart
Publishers ======== Toronto
Copyright, Canada, 1920
By McClelland & Stewart, Limited, Toronto





  THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED

  TO THE MEMORY OF MY FATHER

  JAMES BENNETT BAXTER

  WHO BELIEVED THOUGHT TO BE MORE IMPORTANT
    THAN THINGS, AND WHO WENT THROUGH THIS
      WORLD DISPENSING GENIAL PHILOSOPHY
        AND KINDLY HUMOUR TO ALL
          WHO CAME WITHIN
            HIS CIRCLE




FOREWORD.

Mr. Baxter is my countryman, and, as a Canadian, I commend _The Parts
Men Play_, not only for its literary vitality, but for the freshness of
outlook with which the author handles Anglo-American susceptibilities.

A Canadian lives in a kind of half-way house between Britain and the
United States.  He understands Canada by right of birth; he can
sympathise with the American spirit through the closest knowledge born
of contiguity; his history makes him understand Britain and the British
Empire.  He is, therefore, a national interpreter between the two
sundered portions of the race.

It is this rôle of interpreter that Mr. Baxter is destined to fill, a
rôle for which he is peculiarly suited, not only by temperament, but by
reason of his experiences gained from his entrance into the world of
London journalism and English literature.

I do not know in what order the chapters of _The Parts Men Play_ were
written, but it seems to me that as Mr. Baxter gets to grip with the
realities of his theme, he begins to lose a certain looseness of touch
which marks his opening pages.  If so, he is showing the power of
development, and to the artist this power is everything.  The writer
who is without it is a mere static consciousness weaving words round
the creatures of his own imagination.  The man who has it possesses a
future, because he is open to the teaching of experience.  And among
the men with a future I number Mr. Baxter.

Throughout the book his pictures of life are certainly arresting--taken
impartially both in Great Britain and America.  What could be better
than some of his descriptions?

The speech of the American diplomat at a private dinner is the truest
defence and explanation of America's delay in coming into the war that
I remember to have read.  The scene is set in the high light of
excitement, and the rhetorical phrasing of the speech would do credit
to a famous orator.

But I fear that I may be giving the impression that _The Parts Men
Play_ is merely a piece of propagandist fiction--something from which
the natural man shrinks back with suspicion.  Nothing could be farther
from the truth.  Mr. Baxter's strength lies in the rapid flow and sweep
of his narrative.  His characterisation is clear and firm in outline,
but it is never pursued into those quicksands of minute analysis which
too often impede the stream of good story-telling.

I am glad that a Canadian novelist should have given us a book which
supports the promise shown by the author in _The Blower of Bubbles_,
and marks him out for a distinguished future.

If in the course of a novel of action he has something to teach his
British readers about the American temperament, and his American public
about British mentality, so much the better.


BEAVERBROOK.




CONTENTS.


CHAPTER

     I.  LADY DURWENT DECIDES ON A DINNER
    II.  CONCERNING LADY DURWENT'S FAMILY
   III.  ABOUT A TOWN HOUSE
    IV.  PROLOGUE TO A DINNER-PARTY
     V.  THE OLYMPIANS THUNDER
    VI.  A MORNING IN NOVEMBER
   VII.  THE CAFE ROUGE
  VIII.  INTERMEZZO
    IX.  A HOUSE-PARTY AT ROSELAWN
     X.  GATHERING SHADOWS
    XI.  THE RENDING OF THE VEIL
   XII.  THE HONOURABLE MALCOLM DURWENT STARTS ON A JOURNEY
  XIII.  THE MAN OF SOLITUDE
   XIV.  STRANGE CRAFT
    XV.  DICK DURWENT
   XVI.  THE FEMININE TOUCH
  XVII.  MOONLIGHT
 XVIII.  ELISE
   XIX.  EN VOYAGE
    XX.  THE GREAT NEUTRAL
   XXI.  A NIGHT IN JANUARY
  XXII.  THE CHALLENGE
 XXIII.  THE SMUGGLER BREED
  XXIV.  THE SENTENCE
   XXV.  THE FIGHT FOR THE BRIDGE
  XXVI.  THE END OF THE ROAD
 XXVII.  A LIGHT ON THE WATER




THE PARTS MEN PLAY.


CHAPTER I.

LADY DURWENT DECIDES ON A DINNER.


I.

His Majesty's postmen were delivering mail.  Through the gray grime of
a November morning that left a taste of rust in the throat, the
carriers of letters were bearing their cargo to all the corners of that
world which is called London.

There were letters from hospitals asking for funds; there were appeals
from sick people seeking admission to hospital.  There were long, legal
letters and little, scented letters lying wonderingly together in the
postman's bag.  There were notes from tailors to gentlemen begging to
remind them; and there were answers from gentlemen to their tailors, in
envelopes bearing the crests of Pall Mail clubs, hinting of temporary
embarrassment, but mentioning certain prospects that would shortly
enable them to . . . .

Fat, bulging envelopes, returning manuscripts with editors' regrets,
were on their way to poor devils of scribblers living in the altitude
of unrecognised genius and a garret.  There were cringing, fawning
epistles, written with a smirk and sealed with a scowl; some there were
couched in a refinement of cruelty that cut like a knife.

But, as unconcerned as tramps plying contraband between South America
and Mexico, His Majesty's postmen were delivering His Majesty's mail,
with never a thought of the play of human emotions lying behind the
sealed lips of an envelope.  If His Majesty's subjects insisted upon
writing to one another, it was obvious that their letters, in some
mysterious way become the property of His Majesty, had to be delivered.

Thus it happened, on a certain November morning in the year 1913, that
six dinner invitations, enclosed in small, square envelopes with a
noble crest on the back, and large, unwieldy writing on the front, were
being carried through His Majesty's fog to six addresses in the West
End of London.

Lady Durwent had decided to give a dinner.

An ordinary hostess merely writes a carelessly formal note stating that
she hopes the recipient will be able to dine with her on a certain
evening.  The form of her invitations varies as little as the
conversation at her table.  But Lady Durwent was _unusual_.  For years
she had endeavoured to impress the fact on London, and by careful
attention to detail had at last succeeded in gaining that reputation.
She was that _rara avis_ among the women of to-day--the hostess who
knows her guests.  She never asked any one to dine at her house without
some definite purpose in mind--and, for that matter, her guests never
dined with her except on the same terms.

Therefore it came about that Lady Durwent's dinners were among the
pleasantest things in town, and, true to her character of the
_unusual_, she always worded her invitations with a nice discrimination
dictated by the exact motive that prompted the sending.


II.

H. Stackton Dunckley looked up from his pillow as the man-servant who
valeted for the gentlemen of the Jermyn Street Chambers drew aside a
gray curtain and displayed the gray blanket of the atmosphere outside.

'Good-morning, Watson,' said Mr. Dunckley in a voice which gave the
impression that he had smoked too many cigars the previous evening--an
impression considerably strengthened by the bilious appearance of his
face.

'Good-morning, sir.  Will you have the _Times_ or the _Morning Post_?
And here are your letters, sir.'

The recumbent gentleman took the letters and waved them philosophically
at the valet.  'Leave me to my thoughts,' he said thickly, but with
considerable dignity.  'I am not interested in the squeaky jarring of
the world revolving on its rusty axis.'

Being an author, he almost invariably tried out his command of language
in the morning, as a tenor essays two or three notes on rising, to make
sure that his voice has not left him during his slumber.

Mr. Watson bowed and withdrew.  H. Stackton Dunckley lit a cigarette,
opened the first letter, and read it.


'8 CHELMSFORD GARDENS.

'MY DEAR STACKY,--Next Friday I am giving a little dinner-party--just a
few _unusual_ people--to meet an American author who has recently come
to England.  Do come; but, you brilliant man, don't be too caustic,
will you?

'Isn't it dreadful the way gossip is connecting our names?  Supposing
Lord Durwent should hear about it!--Until Friday,

'SYBIL DURWENT.

'P.S.--How is _the_ play coming on?  Dinner will be at 8.30.'


H. Stackton Dunckley put the letter down and sighed.  He was an author
who had been writing other men's ideas all his life, but without
sufficient distinction to achieve either a success or a failure.  He
had gained some notoriety by his wife suing him for divorce; but when
the Court granted her separation on the ground of desertion, it cleared
him of the charge of infidelity--and of the chance of advertisement at
the same moment.  Later, by being a constant attendant on Lady Durwent,
he almost succeeded in creating a scandal; but, to the great
disappointment of them both, London flatly refused to believe there was
anything wrong.  For one thing, she was the daughter of a commoner--and
the morality of the middle classes is a conviction solidly rooted in
English society.  And then there were his writings.  How could one
doubt the character of a man so dull?

Undiscouraged, they still maintained their perfectly innocent
friendship, and, like kittens playing with a spool, invested it with
all the appearances of an intrigue.

Dismissing his depressing thoughts, H. Stackton Dunckley noticed that
his cigarette was out, and closing his eyes, fell asleep once more.


III.

Madame Carlotti, clothed in a kimono of emphatic shade, sat by the fire
in her rooms in Knightsbridge and read her mail while sipping coffee.
She was the wife of an Italian diplomat, a sort of wandering
plenipotentiary who did business in every part of the world but London,
and with every Government but that of Britain.  It was the signora's
somewhat incomprehensible complaint that her husband's duties forced
her to live in that fog-bound metropolis, and having thus achieved the
pedestal of a martyr, she poured abuse on everything English from
climate to customs.  Possessed of a certain social dexterity and the
ability to make the most ordinary conversation seem to concern a
forbidden topic, Madame Carlotti was in great demand as a guest, and
abused more English habits and attended more dinner-parties than any
other woman in London.

From beneath seven tradesmen's letters she extracted one from Lady
Durwent.


'8 CHELMSFORD GARDENS,

'DEAREST LUCIA,--I am counting on you for next Friday.  A young
American author studying England--I suppose like that Count
Something-or-other in _Pickwick Papers_--is coming to dinner.  I
understand he drinks very little, so I am relying on you to thaw him.

'Stackton Dunckley _insists_ upon coming, though I tell him that it is
dangerous; and of course people are saying dreadful things, I know.  He
is _so_ persistent.  There will be just half-a-dozen _unusual_ people
there, my dear, so don't fail me.  Dinner will be at 8.30.--So
sincerely,    SYBIL DERWENT.

'P.S.--Don't you think you could make Stackton interested in you?  Your
husband is away so much.'


Madame Carlotti smiled with her teeth and drank some very strong coffee.

'It ees deefficult,' she said, with that seductive formation of the
lips used by her countrywomen when speaking English, 'for a magnet to
attract putty.  Still--there ees the American.  At least I shall not be
altogether bored.'


IV.

That noon, in a restaurant of Chelsea, the district of Pensioners and
Bohemians, two young gentlemen, considerably in need of renovation by
both tailor and barber, met at a table and nodded gloomily.  One was
Johnston Smyth, an artist, who, finding himself possessed neither of a
technique nor of the industry to acquire one, had evolved a
super-futurist style that had made him famous in a night.  He was
spoken of as 'a new force;' it was prophesied that English Art would
date from him.  Unfortunately his friends neglected to buy his
paintings, and as his art was a vivid one, consisting of vast
quantities of colour splashed indiscriminately on the canvas, it took
more than his available funds to purchase the accessories of his
calling.  He was tall, with expressive arms that were too long for his
sleeves, and a nose that would have done credit to a field-marshal.

The other was Norton Pyford, the modernist composer, who had developed
the study of discord to such a point that his very features seemed to
lack proportion, and when he smiled his face presented a lop-sided
appearance.  He had given a recital which set every one who is any one
in London talking.  There was but one drawback--they talked so much
that he could persuade no one to listen, and he carried his discords
about with him, like a bad half-crown, unable to rid himself of them.
He was short, with a retreating forehead and an overhanging wealth of
black, thread-like hair, gamely covering the retreat as best it could.

'Hello, Smyth!' drawled the composer, who affected a manner of speech
usually confined to footmen in the best families.  'Hah d' do?'

'Topping, Pyford.  How's things?'

'Rotten.'

'Same here.'

'I say, you couldn't'----

'Just what I was going to ask you.'

The composer sighed; the artist echoed the sigh.

'Have you seen Shaw's show?'

'Awful, isn't it?'

'Putrid--but the English don't'----

'Ah!  What a race!'

'Just so.  I say, are you going to Lady Durwent's on Friday?'

'Yes, rather.'

'Look here, old fellow--don't dress, eh?'

'Right.  Let's be natural--what?  Just Bohemians.'

'The very thing.  By-the-by, you don't know a laundry that gives'----

'No, I can't say I do.'

'Well, so long.'

'Good-bye.'

'See you Friday.'

'Right.'


V.

Mrs. Le Roy Jennings looked up from her task of drafting the new
Resolution to be presented to Parliament by the League of Equal Sex
Rights and Complete Emancipation for Women, as a diminutive,
half-starved servant brought in a letter on a tray.

Mrs. Jennings took the missive, and frowning threateningly at the girl,
who withdrew to the dark recesses of the servants' quarters, opened it
by slitting its throat with a terrific paper-knife.


'8 CHELMSFORD GARDENS.

'DEAR MRS LE ROY JENNINGS,--An American author is coming to dinner next
Friday.  There will just be a few _unusual_ people, and I have asked
them for 8.30.  I want him to meet one of England's intellectual women,
and I _know_ he will be interested to hear of your ideas on the New
Home.

'My daughter joins with me in wishing you every success.--Until Friday,
dear,

'SYBIL DURWENT.'


Mrs. Jennings, who had made a complete failure of her own home, and
consequently felt qualified to interfere with all others, scribbled a
hasty note of acceptance in a handwriting so forceful that on some
words the pen slid off the paper completely.

Then, with a look of profundity, she resumed the Resolution.


VI.

And so, by the medium of His Majesty's mail, a little group of actors
were warned for a performance at Lady Durwent's house, No. 8 Chelmsford
Gardens.

Through the November fog the endless traffic of the streets was
cautiously feeling its way along the diverging channels of the
Metropolis--a snorting, sliding, impatient fleet of vehicles
perpetually on their way, yet never seeming to get there.  Taxi-cabs
hugged the pavements, trying to penetrate the gloom with their meagre
lights; omnibuses fretted and bullied their way, avoiding collision by
inches, but struggling on and on as though their very existence
depended on their reaching some place immediately or being interned for
failure.  Hansom-cabs, with ancient, glistening horses driven by
ancient, glistening cabbies, felt for elbow-space in the throng of
motor-vehicles.  And on all sides the badinage of the streets, the
eternal wordy conflict of London's mariners of traffic, rose in
cheerful, insulting abundance.

On the pavements pedestrians jostled each other--men with hands in
their pockets and arms tight to their sides, women with piqued noses
and hurrying steps; while sulky lamps offered half-hearted resistance
to the conquering fog that settled over palaces, parks, and motley
streets until it hugged the very Thames itself in unholy glee.

And through the impenetrable mist of circumstance, the millions of
souls that make up the great city pursued their millions of destinies,
undeterred by biting cold and grisly fog.  For it was a day in the life
of England's capital; and every day there is a great human drama that
must be played--a drama mingling tragedy and humour with no regard to
values or proportion; a drama that does not end with death, but renews
its plot with the breaking of every dawn; a drama knowing neither
intermezzo nor respite: and the name of it is--LONDON.




CHAPTER II

CONCERNING LADY DURWENT'S FAMILY.


I.

Lady Durwent was rather a large woman, of middle age, with a high
forehead unruffled by thought, and a clear skin unmarred by wrinkles.
She had a cheerfulness that obtruded itself, like a creditor, at
unpropitious moments; and her voice, though not displeasing, gave the
impression that it might become volcanic at any moment.  She also
possessed a considerable theatrical instinct, with which she would
frequently manoeuvre to the centre of the stage, to find, as often as
not, that she had neglected the trifling matter of learning any lines.

She was the daughter of an ironmonger in the north of England, whose
father had been one of the last and most famous of a long line of
smugglers.  It was perhaps the inherited love of adventure that
prompted the ironmonger, against his wife's violent protest, to invest
the savings of a lifetime in an obscure Canadian silver-mine.  To the
surprise of every one (including its promoters), the mine produced
high-grade ore in such abundance that the ironmonger became a man of
means.  Thereupon, at the instigation of his wife, they moved from
their little town into the city of York, where he purchased a large,
stuffily furnished house, sat on Boards, became a councillor, wore
evening-dress for dinner, and died a death of absolute respectability.

Before the final event he had the satisfaction of seeing his only child
Sybil married to Arthur, Lord Durwent.  (The evening-clothes for dinner
were a direct result.)  Lord Durwent was a well-behaved young man of
unimpeachable character and family, and he was sincerely attracted by
the agreeable expanse of lively femininity found in the fair Sybil.
After a wedding that left her mother a triumphant wreck and appreciably
hastened her father's demise, she was duly installed as the mistress of
Roselawn, the Durwent family seat, and its tributary farms.  The
tenants gave her an address of welcome; her husband's mother gracefully
retired to a villa in Sussex; the rector called and expressed
gratification; the county families left their cards and inquired after
her father, the ironmonger.

Unfortunately the new Lady Durwent had the temperament neither of a
poet nor of a lady of the aristocracy.  She failed to hear the tongues
in trees, and her dramatic sense was not satisfied with the little
stage of curtsying tenantry and of gentlefolk who abhorred the very
thought of anything theatrical in life.

On the other hand, her husband was a man who was unhappy except on his
estate.  He thought along orthodox lines, and read with caution.  He
loved his lawns, his gardens, his horses, and his habits.  He was a
pillar of the church, and always read a portion of Scripture from the
reading-desk on Sunday mornings.  His wife he treated with simple
courtesy as the woman who would give him an heir.  If his mind had been
a little more sensitive, Lord Durwent would have realised that he was
asking a hurricane to be satisfied with the task of a zephyr.

They had a son.

The tenants presented him with a silver bowl; Lord Durwent presented
them with a garden fête; and the parents presented the boy with the
name of Malcolm.

Two years later there came a daughter.

The tenants gave her a silver plate; Lord Durwent gave them a garden
fête; and he and his wife gave the girl the name of Elise.

Three years later a second son appeared.

There was a presentation, followed by a garden fête and a christening.
The name was Richard.

In course of time the elder son grew to that mental stature when the
English parent feels the time is ripe to send him away to school.  The
ironmonger's daughter had the idea that Malcolm, being her son, was
hers to mould.

'My dear,' said Lord Durwent, exerting his authority almost for the
first time, 'the boy is eight years of age, and no time must be lost in
preparing him for Eton and inculcating into him those qualities which
mark'----

'But,' cried his wife with theatrical unrestraint, 'why send him to
Eton?  Why not wait until you see what he wants to be in the world?'

Lord Durwent's face bore a look of unperturbed calm.  'When he is old
enough, he must go to Eton, my dear, and acquire the qualities which
will enable him to take over Roselawn at my death'----

At this point Lady Durwent interrupted him with a tirade which, in
common with a good many domestic unpleasantries, was born of much that
was irrelevant, springing from sources not readily apparent.  She
abused the public-school system of England, and sneered at the county
families which blessed the neighbourhood with their presence.  She
reviled Lord Durwent's habits, principally because they _were_ habits,
and thought it was high time some Durwent grew up who wasn't just a
'sticky, stuffy, starched, and bored porpoise--yes, PORPOISE!' (shaking
her head as if to establish the metaphor against the whole of the
English aristocracy).  In short, it was the spirit of the Ironmonger
castigating the Peerage, and at its conclusion Lady Durwent felt much
abused, and quite pleased with her own rhetoric.

Lord Durwent glanced for courage at an ancestor who looked
magnificently down at him over a ruffle.  He adjusted his own cravat
and spoke in nicely modulated accents: 'Sybil, nothing can change me on
this point.  In spite of what you say, it is my intention to keep to
the tradition of the Durwents, and that is that the occupant of
Roselawn'----

'What! am not I his mother?' cried the good woman, her hysteria having
much the same effect on Lord Durwent's smoothly developing monologue as
a heavy pail dropped by a stage-hand during Hamlet's soliloquy.

'Sybil,' said Lord Durwent sternly, 'it was arranged at Malcolm's birth
that he should go to Eton.  I shall take him next Tuesday to a
preparatory school, and you must excuse me if I refuse to discuss the
matter further.'

Lady Durwent rushed from the room and clasped her eldest child in her
arms.  That young gentleman, not knowing what had caused his mother's
grief, sympathetically opened his throat and bellowed lustily, thereby
shedding tears for positively the last time in his life.

When he returned for the holidays a few months later, he was an
excellent example of that precocity, the English schoolboy, who cloaks
a juvenile mind with the pose of sophistication, and by twelve years of
age achieves a code of thought and conduct that usually lasts him for
the rest of his life.  In vain the mother strove for her place in the
sun; the rule of the masculine at Roselawn became adamant.

Life in the Durwent _ménage_ developed into a thing of laws and customs
dictated by the youthful despot, aided and abetted by his father.  The
sacred rites of 'what isn't done' were established, and the mother
gradually found herself in the position of an outsider--a privileged
outsider, it is true, yet little more than the breeder of a
thoroughbred, admitted to the paddock to watch his horse run by its new
owner.

She vented her feelings in two or three tearful scenes, but she felt
that they lacked spontaneity, and didn't really put her heart into them.

During these struggles for her place in a Society that was probably
more completely masculine in domination than any in the world (with the
possible exception of that of the Turk), Lady Durwent was only dimly
aware that her daughter was developing a personality which presented a
much greater problem than that of the easily grooved Malcolm.

The girl's hair was like burnished copper, and her cheeks were lit by
two bits of scarlet that could be seen at a distance before her
features were discernible.  Her eyes were of a gray-blue that changed
in shade with her swiftly varying moods.  Her lower lip was full and
red, the upper one firm and repressed with the dull crimson of a fading
rose-petal.  Her shapely arms and legs were restless, seemingly
impatient to break into some quickly moving dance.  She was
extraordinarily alive.  Vitality flashed from her with every gesture,
and her mind, a thing of caprice and whim, knew no boundaries but those
of imagination itself.

Puzzled and entirely unable to understand anything so instinctive, Lady
Durwent engaged a governess who was personally recommended by Lady
Chisworth, whose friend the Countess of Oxeter had told her that the
three daughters of the Duchess of Dulworth had all been entrusted to
her care.

In spite of this almost unexampled set of references, the governess was
completely unable to cope with Elise Durwent.  She taught her (among
other things) decorum and French.  Her pupil was openly irreverent
about the first; and when the governess, after the time-honoured
method, produced an endless vista of exceptions to the rule in French
grammar, the girl balked.  She was willing to compromise on _Avoir_,
but mutinied outright at the ramifications of _Être_.

Seeing that the child was making poor progress, and as it was out of
the question to dismiss a governess who had been entrusted with the
three daughters of the Duchess of Dulworth, Lady Durwent sent for
reinforcement in the person of the organist of their church, and bade
him teach Elise the art of the piano.  With the dull lack of vision
belonging to men of his type, he failed to recognise the spirit of
music lying in her breast, merely waiting the call to spring into life.
He knew that her home was one where music was unheard, and his method
of unfolding to the girl the most spiritual and fundamental of all the
arts was to give her SCALES.  He was a kindly, well-intentioned fellow,
and would not willingly have hurt a sparrow; but he took a nature
doomed to suffer for lack of self-expression, and succeeded in walling
up the great river of music which might have given her what she lacked.
He hid the edifice and offered her scaffolding--then wondered.


II.

Elise was consistent in few things, but her love for Richard, the
youngest of the family, was of a depth and a mature tenderness that
never varied.  Doomed to an insufficient will-power and an easy,
plastic nature that lent itself readily to the abbreviation 'Dick,' he
quickly succumbed to his fiery-tinted sister, and became a willing dupe
in all her escapades.

At her order he turned the hose on the head-gardener; when told to put
mucilage on the rector's chair at dinner, he merely asked for the pot.
On six different occasions she offered him soap, telling him it was
toffy, and each time he bit of it generously and without suspicion.
Every one else in the house represented law and order to him--Elise was
the spirit of outlawry, and he her slave.  She taught him a dance of
her own invention entitled 'The Devil and the Maiden' (with a certain
inconsistency casting him as the maiden and herself as the Devil), and
frequently, when ordered to go to bed, they would descend to the
servants' quarters and perform it to the great delight of the family
retainers.

A favourite haunt of theirs was the stables, where they would persuade
the grooms to place them on their father's chargers; and they were
frequent visitors at feeding-time, taking a never-ending delight in the
gourmandism of the whinnying beasts, and finding particular joy in
acquiring the language and the mannerisms of the stablemen, which they
would reserve for, and solemnly use at, the next gathering of the
neighbouring gentry.

When Elise was ten and Dick seven, she read him highwaymen's tales
until his large blue eyes almost escaped from their sockets.  It was at
the finish of one of these narratives of derring-do that she whispered
temptation into his ear, with the result that they bided their
opportunity, and, when the one groom on duty was asleep, repaired to
the stables armed with a loaded shot-gun.  After herculean efforts they
succeeded in harnessing Lord Durwent's famous hunter with the saddle
back to front, the curb-bit choking the horse's throat, the brow-band
tightly strapped around the poor beast's nostrils, the surcingle
trailing in the dust.

With improvised masks over their faces, they mounted the steed and set
out for adventure, the horse seeming to comprehend its strange burden
and stepping as lightly as its tortures would permit, while the saddle
slid cheerfully about its back, threatening any moment to roll the
desperados on to the road.

They had just emerged from the estate into the public highway, when a
passing butcher's cart stopped their progress.  The younger Durwent,
who had been mastering the art of retaining his seat while his steed
was in motion, was unprepared for its cessation, and promptly
overbalanced over the horse's shoulder, reaching the road head first,
and discharging a couple of pellets from the shotgun into a fleshy part
of the butcher-boy's anatomy.

The groom was dismissed; the butcher-boy received ten pounds; Richard
(when it was certain that concussion of the brain was not going to
materialise) was soundly whipped; and Elise was banished for
forty-eight hours to her room, issuing with a carefully concocted plan
to waylay the rector coming from church, steal the collection, and
purchase with the ill-gotten gains the sole proprietary interests in
the village sweet-shop.

There is little doubt but that the _coup_ would have been attempted had
not Lord Durwent decided that the influence of his sister was not good
for Dick, and sent him to a preparatory school at Bexhill-on-Sea, there
to imbibe sea-air and some little learning, and await his entrance into
Eton.

Robbed of her brother's stimulating loyalty, Elise relapsed into a
sulky obedience to her governess and her mother.  To their puny vision
it seemed that her attitude towards them was one of haughty aloofness,
and everything possible was done to subdue her spirit.  Being unable to
see that the child was lonely, and too proud to admit her craving for
sympathetic companionship, they tried to tame the thoroughbred as they
would a mule.

Only when Dick returned for holidays would her petulant moods vanish,
and in his company her old vitality sparkled like the noonday sun upon
the ocean's surface.  And if her affection for him knew no variation,
his was no less true.  The friendships and the adventures of school
were forgotten in the comradeship of his sister as, over the fields of
Roselawn or on the tennis-court, they would renew their childhood's
hours.  He taught her to throw a fly for trout, and she initiated him
into the mysteries of answering the calls of birds in the woods.
Mounted on a couple of ponies, they became familiar figures at the
tenants' cottages, and though the spirit of outlawry mellowed with
advancing years, Lady Durwent never saw them start away from the house
without the uneasy feeling that there was more than a chance they would
get into some mischief before they returned.

In the meantime the elder son was bringing credit to his ancestors and
himself.  His accent became a thing of perfection, nicely nuanced, and
entirely free of any emphasis or intensity that might rob it of its
placid suggestion of good-breeding.  His attitude towards the servants
was one of pleasant dignity, and the tenantry all spoke of Master
Malcolm as a fine young gentleman who would make a worthy ruler of
Roselawn.

Between him and Richard there was little love lost.  The elder boy
disapproved of his hoydenish sister, and sought at all times to shame
her tempestuous nature by insistence on decorum in their relations.
Richard, who invariably brought home adverse reports from school, could
find no fault in his colourful sister, and blindly espoused her cause
at all times.

On one occasion, when Malcolm had been more than usually censorious,
Dick challenged him to a fight.  They adjourned to the seclusion of a
small plot of grass by a great oak, where the Etonian knocked Dick down
five times in succession, afterwards escorting him to the cook, who
placed raw beefsteak on his eyes.

It was characteristic of the worthy Richard that he bore his brother no
malice whatever for the punishment.  He had proposed the fight,
conscious of the fact that he would be soundly beaten, but he was a bit
of a Quixote--and a lady's name was involved.

And no nurse ever tended a wounded hero more tenderly than the little
copper-haired creature of impulse who bathed the battered face of poor
Dick.  Wilful and rebellious as she was, there was in Elise a deep well
of love for her brother that no other being could fathom.  And it was
not his loyalty alone that had inspired it.  Her solitary life had
quickened her perceptive powers, and intuitively she knew that, in the
years before him, her weak-willed, buoyant-natured brother would be
unable to meet the cross-currents of his destiny and maintain a steady
course.

But he thought it was because of his swollen eyes that she cried.




CHAPTER III.

ABOUT A TOWN HOUSE.


I.

It was perhaps not inconsistent with the character of Lady Durwent
that, although she had striven to secure the guiding of Malcolm's
development, she should find herself totally devoid of any plan for the
training of a daughter.

Vaguely--and in this she mirrored thousands of other mothers--there was
a hope in her heart that Elise would grow up pretty, virtuous, amiable,
and would eventually marry well.  It did not concern her that the girl
was permeated with individuality, that the temperament of an artist lay
behind the changing eyes in that restless, graceful figure.  She could
not see that her daughter had a delicate, wilful personality, which
would rebel increasingly against the monotony of a social regime that
planned the careers of its sons before they were born, and offered its
daughters a mere incoherency of good intentions.

Full of the swift imaginativeness which makes the feminine contribution
to life so much a thing of charm and colour, Elise pursued the paths
which Youth has for its own--those wonderful streets of fantasy that
end with adolescence in Society's ugly fields of sign-posts.

Lacking the companionship of others of a similar age, she wove her own
conception of life, and dreamed of a world actuated by quick and
generous emotions.  With every pulsing beat of the warm blood coursing
through her veins she demanded in her girl's mind that the world in
which her many-sided self had been placed should yield the wines to
satisfy the subtle shades of thirst produced by her insistent
individuality.

And the world offered her sign-posts.  This must you do and thus must
you talk; hither shall you go and here remain: these are the Arts with
which you may enjoy a very slight acquaintance, but do not aspire to
genuine accomplishment--leave that to common people; be lady-like, be
calm and reserved; behold your brothers, how they swank!--but they are
men, and this is England; desire nought but the protected privileges of
your class, and in good season some youth of the same social stratum as
yourself will marry you, and, lo! in place of being a daughter in a
landed gentleman's house, you will be a wife.

Into this little world of a kind-hearted, chivalrous aristocracy (whose
greatest fault was their ignorance of the fact that the smallest
upheaval in humanitarianism, no matter what distance away, registers on
the seismograph of human destiny the world over) Elise Durwent found
her path laid.  Increasingly resentful, she trod it until she was
fourteen years of age, when her mother, who had long been bored with
country life, made an important decision--and purchased a town house.

Having done this, Lady Durwent sent her daughter to a convent, a move
which enabled her to get rid of the governess discreetly, and left her
without family cares at all, as both boys were now at school.
Unencumbered, therefore, she said _au revoir_ to Roselawn, and set her
compass for No. 8 Chelmsford Gardens, London.


II.

Chelmsford Gardens is a row of dignified houses on Oxford Street--yet
not on Oxford Street.  A miniature park, some forty feet in depth, acts
as a buffer-state between the street itself and the little group of
town houses.  It is an oasis in the great plains of London's dingy
dwelling-places, a spot where the owners are rarely seen unless the
season is at its height, when gaily cloaked women and stiff-bosomed men
emerge at theatre-hour and are driven to the opera.  Throughout the day
the Gardens (probably so styled on account of the complete absence of
horticultural embellishments) are as silent as the tomb; there is no
sign of life except in the mornings, when a solemn butler or a
uniformed parlour-maid appears for a moment at the door like some
creature of the sea coming up for air, then unobtrusively retires.

No. 8 was exactly like its neighbours, consisting of an exterior
boasting a huge oak door, with cold, stone steps leading up to it, and
an interior composed of rooms with very high ceilings, an insufficient
and uncomfortable supply of furniture, large pictures and small grates,
terrific beds and meagre chairs, and a general air of so much marble
and bare floor that one could almost imagine that house-cleaning could
be accomplished by turning on the hose.

After Lady Durwent had taken possession she sent for her husband, but
that gentleman reminded her that he was much happier at Roselawn,
though he would be glad if she would keep a room for him when business
at the 'House' or with his lawyers necessitated his presence in town.
Unhampered, therefore, by a husband, Lady Durwent prepared to invade
London Society, only to receive a shock at the very opening of the
campaign.

The Ironmonger had preceded her!

It is one of the tragedies of the _élite_ that even peers are not
equal.  The law of class distinction, that amazing doctrine of
timidity, penetrated even the oak door of 8 Chelmsford Gardens.  The
Ironmonger's daughter found that being the daughter of a man who had
made an honest living rendered her socially the unequal of the
daughters of men who, acting on a free translation of 'The earth is the
Lord's,' had done nothing but inherit unearned substance.

Then there was her cheerfulness, and the menacing voice!

Turning from the aloofness of the exclusive, Lady Durwent thought of
taking in famous performing Lions and feeding them.  Unfortunately the
market was too brisk, and the only Lion she could get was an Italian
tenor from Covent Garden, who refused to roar, but left a poignant
memory of garlic.

It was then that a brilliant idea entered her brain.  Lady Durwent
decided to cultivate _unusual_ people.

No longer would she batter at oak doors that refused to open; no more
would she dangle morsels of food in front of overfed Lions.  She would
create a little Kingdom of remarkable people--not those acclaimed great
by the mealy mob, but those whose genius was of so rare and subtle a
growth that ordinary eyes could not detect it at all.  Her only fear
was that she might be unable to discover a sufficient number to create
a really satisfactory _clientèle_.

But she reckoned without her London.

For every composer in the Metropolis who is trying to translate the
music of the spheres, there are a dozen who can only voice the
discordant jumble of their minds or ask the world to listen to the
hollow echo of their creative vacuum.  For every artist striving to
catch some beauty of nature that he may revisualise it on canvas, there
are a score whose eyes can only cling to the malformation of existence.
For every writer toiling in the quiet hours to touch some poor, dumb
heart-strings, or to open unseeing eyes to the joy of life, there are
many whose gaze is never lifted from the gutter, so that, when they
write, it is of the slime and the filth that they have smelt, crying to
the world that the blue of the skies and the beauty of a rose are
things engendered of sentimental minds unable to see the real, the
vital things of life.

To this community of _poseurs_ Lady Durwent jingled her town house and
her title--and the response was instantaneous.  She became the hostess
of a series of dinner-parties which gradually made her the subject of
paragraphs in the chatty columns of the press, and of whole chapters in
the gossip of London's refined circles.

Her natural cheerfulness expanded like a sunflower, and when her son
Malcolm secured a commission in the --th Hussars, her triumph was
complete.  Even the staggering news that Dick had been taken away from
Eton to avoid expulsion for drunkenness proved only a momentary cloud
on the broad horizon of her contentment.

When she was nineteen years of age Elise came to live with her mother,
and as the fiery beauty of the child had mellowed into a sort of
smouldering charm that owed something to the mystic atmosphere of
convent life, Lady Durwent felt that an ally of importance had entered
the arena.

Thus four years passed, and in 1913 (had peeresses been in the habit of
taking inventories) Lady Durwent could have issued a statement somewhat
as follows:


  ASSETS.

  1 Husband; a Peer.
  1 Son; aged twenty-five; decently popular with his regiment.
  1 Daughter; marriageable; aged twenty-three.
  1 Town House.
  1 Country Estate.
  The goodwill of numerous _unusual_ people, and the envy of a
  lot of minor Peeresses.


  LIABILITIES.

  1 Son; aged twenty; at Cambridge; in perpetual trouble,
  and would have been rusticated ere now had he not been the
  son of a lord.
  1 Ironmonger.


      *      *      *      *      *      *

'My dear,' said Lady Durwent, glancing at her daughter, who was reading
a novel, 'hadn't you better go and dress?'

'Is there a dinner-party to-night?' asked the girl without looking up.

'Of course, Elise.  Have you forgotten that Mr. Selwyn of New York will
be here?'

'Is he as tedious as Stackton Dunckley?'

Lady Durwent frowned with vexation.  'My dear,' she said, 'you are very
trying.'




CHAPTER IV.

PROLOGUE TO A DINNER-PARTY.


I.

Even _unusual_ dinner-parties begin like ordinary ones.  There is the
discomfiture of the guest who arrives first, subjected to his hostess's
reassurances that he is not really early.  After what seems an
interminable length of time, during which a score of conversational
topics are broached, and both hostess and guest are reduced to a state
bordering on mutual animosity, the remainder of the party arrive _en
masse_, as if by collusion.  The butler (who likes to chew the cud of
reflection between the announcements) is openly pained, while the
distracted hostess must manage the introductions, and, as friendships
are begun or enmities renewed, endeavour to initiate the new-comer into
the subject of conversation immediately preceding his or her entrance.
As the good woman's subconscious mind is in the kitchen, and as she is
constantly interrupted by the necessity of greeting new arrivals, she
usually succeeds in mystifying every one, and creating that atmosphere
of 'nerves' so familiar to denizens of the best sets.

But we had almost forgotten--there is always one guest who is late.

The fateful hour mentioned in the dinner invitation arrives, strikes,
and floats down the mists to the eerie catacombs of the Past.  The
hostess knows that the cook, with arms akimbo, is breathing rebellion,
but tries to blot out the awful vision by an extra spurt of hollow
gaiety.

Ten minutes pass.

Conversation flags.  The portly bachelor who lives at his club wonders
why he didn't have a chop before he came.  His fellow-diners try to
refrain from the topic, but it is as hopeless as trying to talk to an
ex-convict without mentioning jails.  Finally, in an abandon of
desperation, they all turn inquiringly to the hostess, who, affecting
an ease of manner, says pleasantly, 'Dear me!  What _can_ have detained
Mr. So-and-so?  I wonder if we had better go in without him?'

And then he arrives--the jackass--and in a sublime good-humour!  He
tells some cock-and-bull story about his taxi breaking down, and
actually seems to think he's done rather a smart thing in turning up at
all.  In short, he brings in such an air of geniality and
self-appreciation that the guest who arrived first has more than a
notion to 'have him out' and send him to a region where dinner-parties
are popularly supposed to be unknown.

No--the lot of a lady who gives dinners is not a happy one.


II.

On this Friday night of November in the year 1918, Lady Durwent sat by
the fire in the drawing-room and discussed music with Norton Pyford.
Having sacrificed his watch on the altar of art, he had been compelled
to rely on appetite, with the result that he arrived just as eight was
striking.  Lady Durwent did her best, but as she knew nothing of music,
nor he anything of anything else, the situation was becoming difficult,
when the entrance of Madame Carlotti brought welcome relief.

That lady was wearing a yellow gown rather too tight for her, so that
her somewhat ample flesh slightly overran the confines of the garment,
giving the effect that she had grown up in the thing and was unable to
shed it.  This impression was heightened by a mannerism, repeated
frequently during the evening, of grasping her very low bodice with her
hands, exhausting her breath, pulling the bodice up, and compressing
herself into it.  It was an innocent enough performance, but invariably
left the feeling that she should retire upstairs to do it.

She wore a yellow flower in her hair; her stockings were a rich yellow
with a superimposed pattern like strands of fine gold, and her dainty
feet were enclosed in a pair of bronzed shoes.  As her lips were
heavily carmined and her eyes brilliantly dark, Madame Carlotti's was a
distinctly illuminating presence.

But the sunniness of her entrance was dimmed by the lack of audience.
She had not expended her genius to throw it away on a strangely dressed
young man whose hair fell straight and black over a large collar that
had earned a holiday some days before, and whose velvet jacket was
minus two buttons, the threads of which could still be seen,
out-stretched, appealing for their owners' return.

'Lucia, my dear,' said Lady Durwent, just like an ordinary hostess,
'you look' (_sotto voce_) 'simply wonderful!  I think you have met Mr.
Norton Pyford, _the_ Norton Pyford, haven't you?'

'Hah d' ye do?' said the Pyford.

'Chairmed,' minced Madame Carlotti.

'Lucia, take this chair by the fire.  You must be frozen.'

'Ah, _grazie_, Sybil.  What a perfectly meeserable climate you have in
this London!'

'Just what I tha-a-y,' bleated Mr. Pyford, sinking into his chair in an
apparently boneless heap.  'The other night, at a fella's
thupper-party, I'----

'MRS. LE ROY JENNINGS.'

The resolutionist swept into the room clothed in black disorder, much
as if she had started to dress in a fit of temper and had been
overtaken by a gale.

She knew Madame Carlotti.--She did _not_ know Mr. Norton Pyford, _the_
Norton Pyford.--She was glad to know him.

He muttered something inarticulate, and glancing at the ring of women
about him, shrank into his clothes until his collar almost hid his
lower lip.

'We were discussing,' said Lady Durwent, vaguely relying on the last
sounds retained by her ear--'discussing--suppers.'

'Don't believe in 'em,' said Mrs. Jennings sternly; 'three regular
meals--tea at eleven and four, and hot milk with a bit of ginger in it
before retiring--are sufficient for any one.'

The Italian took in the forceful figure of the New Woman and smiled
with her teeth.

'Madame Jennings,' she said, 'perhaps finds sufficient distraction in
just ordinary life--and _una tazza di tè_.  But we who are not
so--_comment dirai-je?_--so self-complete must rely on frivolous things
like _una buona cena_.'

'Don't believe in 'em,' reiterated the resolutionist; 'three
regular'----

'_Ah, c'est mauvais_,' gesticulated Madame Carlotti, who alternated
between Italian and French phrases in London, and kept her best English
for the Continent.

'Mr. Pyford,' put in Lady Durwent, descrying a storm on the yellow and
black horizon, 'has just written'----

'MR. H. STACKTON DUNCKLEY,' announced the butler, with an appropriate
note of _mysterioso_.  Lady Durwent summoned a blush, and rose to meet
the ardent author, who was dressed in a characterless evening suit with
disconsolate legs, and whose chin was heavily powdered to conceal the
stubble of beard grown since morning.

'You have come,' she said softly and dramatically.

'I have,' said the writer, bowing low over her hand.

'I rely on you to be discreet,' she murmured.

'Eh?'

'Discreet,' she coquetted.  'People will talk.'

'Let them,' said Mr. Dunckley earnestly.

'Madame Carlotti, I think you know Mr. Dunckley--H. Stackton
Dunckley--and you too, Mrs. Le Roy Jennings; you clever people ought to
be friends at once.--And I want you to meet Mr. Pyford, _the_'----

'Hah d'ye do?'

'How are you?'

'Ro--splendid, thanks.'

'We were discussing,' said Lady Durwent--'discussing'----

'MR. AUSTIN SELWYN.'

Every one turned to see the guest of the evening, as the hostess rose
to meet him.  He was a young man on the right side of thirty, with
dark, closely brushed hair that thinned slightly at the temples.  He
was clean-shaven, and his light-brown eyes lay in a smiling setting of
quizzical good-humour.  He was of rather more than medium height, with
well-poised shoulders; and though a firmness of lips and jaw gave a
suggestion of hardness, the engaging youthfulness of his eyes and a
hearty smile that crinkled the bridge of his nose left a pleasant
impression of frankness, mingled with a certain _naïveté_.

'Mr. Selwyn,' said Lady Durwent, 'I knew you would want to meet some of
London's--I should say some of England's--accomplished people.'

'_Oimè_!  I am afraid that obleeterates me,' smiled Madame Carlotti,
whose social charm was rising fast at the sight of a good-looking
stranger.

'No, indeed, Lucia,' effused the hostess.  'To be the personification
of Italy in dreary London is more than an accomplishment; it--it'----

'It is a boon,' said Dunckley, coming to the aid of his floundering
loved one.

'Exactly,' said Lady Durwent with a sigh of relief.  'Madame Lucia
Carlotti--Mr. Selwyn of New York.'

'_Buona sera, signora_.'

'_Buona sera, signore_.'

He stooped low and pressed a light kiss on the Neapolitan's hand, thus
taking the most direct route obtainable by an Anglo-Saxon to the good
graces of a woman of Italy.

'How well you speak Italian!' cooed Madame Carlotti; 'so--like one of
us.'

The American bowed.  It was rarely he achieved a reputation with so
little effort.

The remaining introductions were effected; the clock struck
eight-thirty; and there followed an awkward silence, born of an
absolute unanimity of thought.

'Of course, you two authors,' said Lady Durwent, forcing a smile, 'knew
of each other, anyway.  It's like asking H. G. Wells if he ever heard
of Mark Twain.'

The smile in the American's eyes widened.  'Lady Durwent flatters me,'
he said.  'I am not widely known in my own country, and can hardly
expect that you should know of me on this side of the Atlantic.'

'What,' said Mr. Dunckley--'what does New York think of "Precipitate
Thoughts"?'

The American considered quickly.  He wished that in conversation, as
well as in writing, people would use inverted commas.

'Whose precipitate thoughts?' he ventured.

'Mine,' said H. S. D., with ill-concealed importance.

'Oh yes, of course,' said Selwyn, wondering how any one so stationary
as the other could project anything precipitate.  'New York was keenly
interested.'

'Ah,' said the English author benignly, 'it is satisfactory to hear
that.  Of course, the great difference between there and here is that
in New York one impresses: in London one is impressed.'

An ominous silence followed this epigrammatic wisdom (which Dunckley
had just heard from the lips of a poet who had succeeded in writing
both an American and an English publishing house into bankruptcy) while
the various members of the group pursued their trains of thought along
the devious routes of their different mentalities.

'Dear me!' said Lady Durwent anxiously, 'what _can_ have detained'----

'MR. JOHNSTON SMYTH.'

With a jerky action of the knees, the futurist briskly entered the room
with all the easy confidence of a famous comedian following on the
heels of a chorus announcing his arrival.  He looked particularly long
and cadaverous in an abrupt, sporting-artistic, blue jacket, with
sleeves so short that when he waved his arms (which he did with almost
every sentence) he reminded one of a juggler requesting his audience to
notice that he has absolutely nothing up his sleeves.

'Lady Durwent,' he exclaimed, striking an attitude and looking over his
Cyrano-like nose with his right eye as if he were aligning the sights
of a musket, 'don't tell me I'm late.  If you do, I shall never speak
to the Duke of Earldub again--never!'

As he refused to move an inch until assured that he was not late, and
as Lady Durwent was anxious to proceed with the main business of the
evening (to say nothing of maintaining the friendship between Smyth and
the Duke of Earldub, whose part in his dilatory arrival was rather
vague), she granted the necessary pardon, whereupon he straightened his
legs and winked long and solemnly at Norton Pyford.

'Good gracious!' cried Lady Durwent just as she was about to suggest an
exodus to the dining-room, 'I had forgotten all about Elise!'  She
hurriedly rang the bell, which was answered by the butler.  'Send word
to Miss Elise that'----

'Milady,' said the servitor, addressing an arc-light just over the
door, 'she is descending the stairs this very minute.'


III.

There are moments when women appear at their best--fleeting moments
that cannot be sustained.  Sometimes it is a tremor of timidity that
lends a fawn-like gentleness to their movements, and a frightened
wistfulness to the eye, too subtle a thing of beauty to bear analysis
in words.  A sudden triumph, noble or ignoble, the conquering of a
rival, the sound of a lover's voice, will flush the cheek and liberate
the whole radiancy of a woman's being.  Such moments come in every
woman's life, when the quick impulse of emotion achieves an unconscious
beauty that defies the ordinary standards of critical appreciation.  It
is that little instant that is the torch to light a lover's worship or
a poet's verses--to send strange yearnings into a young man's breast
and set an old man's memory philandering with the distant past.

It was such a moment for Elise Durwent as she stood in the doorway, the
overhanging arc touching her hair and shoulders with the high lights of
some master's painting.  Conversation ceased, and in every face there
was the universal homage paid to beauty, even though it be tendered
grudgingly.

She was dressed in a gown of deep blue, that colour which renders its
ageless tribute to the fair women of the world, and from her shoulders
there hung a black net that subdued the colour of the gown and left the
graceful suggestion of a cape.

'I am so sorry, mother,' she said.  'I was reading, and quite forgot
the time.'

Austin Selwyn stroked the back of his head, then thrust both hands into
his pockets.  There was something in the girl's appearance and the
contralto timbre of her voice that left him with the odd sensation that
she was out of place in the room--that her real sphere was in the
expanse of unbridled nature.  He could see her wealth of copper-hued
hair blown by the western wind; he could picture her joining in
Spring's minuet of swaying rose-bushes.

'My daughter Elise--Mr. Austin Selwyn.'

He bowed as the words penetrated his thoughts; then, glancing up, he
felt a sudden contraction of disappointment.

The girl's eyes had narrowed, and were no longer sparkling, but
steady--almost to the point of dullness; her lower lip was full, and
too scarlet for the upper one, which chided its sister for the wanton
admission of slumbering passion; and her voice was abrupt.  He almost
cried out '_Legato, legato_,' to coax back the lilt which had caressed
his ear a moment before.

He was dimly conscious that dinner was announced, and that amidst a
babel of tongues he was being led by, or was leading, Lady Durwent into
the dining-room.  He heard the resolutionist and Dunckley both talking
at once, and felt the melancholy languor of Pyford floating like
incense through the air.  He had an obscure recollection of sitting
down next to his hostess; that the table, like Arthur's, was a round
one; that Johnston Smyth was seated beside Miss Durwent and was ogling
one of Lady Durwent's maids.  Then he remembered that he had heard some
voice in his ear for several minutes past, and, growing curious, took a
surreptitious glance, to find that it belonged to Madame Carlotti.

'Meester Selwyn,' she said indignantly, 'you have not been listening to
me.'

'That is true, signora,' he said; 'but I have been thinking of you.'

'Yes?' she purred, leaning towards him.  'What did you thought?'

He turned squarely to her in an impassioned counterfeit of frankness.
'Are all Italian women beautiful?' he murmured.

'Hush-sh!'  Her hand touched his beneath the table, reprovingly and
tenderly.

'Mr. Selwyn,' said Lady Durwent, 'you have not tasted your soup.'




CHAPTER V.

THE OLYMPIANS THUNDER.


I.

Lady Durwent was blessed in the possession of a cook whose artistry was
beyond question, if the same could not be said of the guests to whom
she so frequently ministered.  She was a descendant of the French, that
race which makes everything tend towards development of the soul, and
consequently looks upon a meal as something of a sacrament.  She
prepared a dinner with a balance of contrast and climax that a composer
might show in writing a tone poem.

On this eventful evening, therefore, the dinner-party, stimulated by
her art and by potent wines (gazing with long-necked dignity at the
autocratic whisky-decanter), rapidly assumed a crescendo and an
accelerando--the two things for which a hostess listens.

H. Stackton Dunckley had held the resolutionist in a duel of
language--a combat with broadswords--and honours were fairly even.  The
short-sleeved Johnston Smyth had waged futurist warfare against the
modernist Pyford, while the Honourable Miss Durwent sat helplessly
between them, with as little chance of asserting her rights as the
Dormouse at the Mad Hatter's tea-party.  The American had held his own
in badinage with the daughter of Italy on one side and his hostess on
the other, the latter, however, being too skilled in entertaining to do
more than murmur a few encouragements to the spontaneity that so
palpably existed.

'Let me see,' said Lady Durwent as the meal came to a close and the
butler looked questioningly at her.  'Shall we'--she opened the caverns
of her throat, producing a volume that instantly silenced every
one--'SHALL WE HAVE COFFEE IN HERE OR IN THE DRAWING-ROOM?  I suppose
you gentlemen, as usual, want to chat over your port and cigars alone.'

H. Stackton Dunckley protested that absence from the ladies, even for
so short a time, would completely spoil his evening--receiving in
reward a languorous glance from Lady Durwent.  Johnston Smyth, who had
done more than ample justice to the wines, offered to 'pink' at fifty
yards any man who would consider the proposition for a moment.  Only
Norton Pyford, in a sort of befuddled gallantry, suggested that the
ladies might have sentimental confidences to exchange, and leered
amorously at Elise Durwent.

'Well,' said Lady Durwent, 'I am sure we are all curious to hear what
Mr. Selwyn thinks of England, so I think we shall have coffee here.  Is
it agreeable to every one?'

Unanimous approval greeted the proposal, and, at a sign from the
hostess, cigarettes, cigars, and coffee made their appearance, with the
corresponding niceties of 'Just one, please,' 'Well, perhaps a
cigarette might be enjoyable,' 'I know men like a cigar,' 'After you,
old man,' and all those various utterances which tickle the ear,
creating in the speaker's breast the feeling of saying the right thing
and doing it rather well.

Throughout the dinner the daughter of the house had sat practically
without a remark, and even when chorus effects were achieved by the
rest, remained with almost immobile features, merely glancing from one
to another, momentarily interested or openly bored.  Several times the
American had looked furtively at the arresting face, marred by too
apparent mental resentment, but the barricade of Johnston Smyth's
angular personality had been too powerful for him to surmount with
anything but the most superficial persiflage.

He had watched her take a cigarette, accepting a light from Smyth, who
surrounded the action with a ludicrous dignity, when she looked up and
met his eyes.

'Mr. Selwyn,' she said, speaking with the same rapidity of phrasing
that had both held and exasperated him before, 'we are all waiting for
the verdict of the Man from America.'

'Over there,' he smiled, 'it is customary to take evidence before
giving a verdict.'

'Good,' boomed the resolutionist; 'very good!'

'Then,' said Lady Durwent, 'we seven shall constitute a jury.'

'Order!'  Johnston Smyth rose to his feet and hammered the table with a
bottle.  '_Oyez, oyez_, you hereby swear that you shall well and truly
try'----

'Can't,' said Norton Pyford, pulling himself up; 'I'm prejudiced.'

'For or against?'

'Against the culprit.'

'My discordant friend,' said Smyth, producing a second bottle from an
unsuspected source and making it disappear mysteriously, 'means that he
is prejudiced against England.  Am I right, sir?'

'Not exactly,' drawled the composer.  'I don't mind England--but I
think the English are awful.'

'That is a nice point,' said Lady Durwent.

'Ah,' broke in Madame Carlotti, 'but, much as I detest the English, I
hate England more.  _Nom de Dieu_!  I--a daughter of the Mediterranean,
where the sun ees so rarely a stranger, and the sky and the water it
ees always blue.  In Italy one lives because she ees alive--it ees
sufficient.  Here it ees always gray, gray--always g-r-ray.  When the
sun comes--_sacramento_! he sees his mistake and goes queek away.  Ah,
Signor Selwyn, it ees _désolant_ that I am compelled to live here.'

A roar of unfeeling laughter greeting her familiar plaint, Madame
Carlotti took a hitch in her gown and reimprisoned some of her person
which had escaped from custody.

'Then,' said Johnston Smyth, 'if we are all of a mind, there is no need
to have a trial.  You have all seen the accusation in Mr. Selwyn's eye,
you have considered the unbiassed evidence of the lovely Carlotti'----

'But jurors can't give evidence,' muttered Mr. Dunckley.

'My dear sir, I know she can't, but she did,' said Smyth triumphantly.
'_Oyez, oyez_--all in favour'----

'But,' interrupted the American, 'are we not to hear any one for the
defence?'

'No,' said Smyth, who was thoroughly happy as a self-constituted master
of ceremonies.  'No one would accept the brief.'

'Then,' said Selwyn, 'I apply for the post of counsel for the defence,
for in the limited time I have been in your country I have seen much
that appeals to me.'

'Of course, it is a well-known fact,' said Dunckley sententiously,
'that American humour relies on exaggeration.'

'No, no,' said Johnston Smyth, hushing the voices with a _pianissimo_
movement of his hands, 'it is not humour on Mr. Selwyn's part, but
gratitude.  In return for Christopher Columbus discovering America,
this gentleman is going to repay the debt of the New World to the Old
by discovering England.'

'SHALL WE HAVE SOME PORT?' said Lady Durwent, opening the sluice-gates
of her vocal production.


II.

'Speaking of America,' said Mrs. Le Roy Jennings a few minutes later,
Johnston Smyth having sat down in order to do justice to the wine of
Portugal, 'she is in the very vanguard of progress.  Women have
achieved an independence there unknown elsewhere in the world.'

'That is true,' said Lady Durwent, who knew nothing whatever about it.

'You are right,' said Madame Carlotti.

'The other day in Paris I heard an American woman whistling.  "Have you
lost your dog?" I asked.  "No," she says; "my husband."'

A chorus of approval greeted this malicious sally, followed by the
retailing of various anti-American anecdotes that made up in sting what
they lacked in delicacy.  These showed no signs of abatement until,
slightly nettled, Selwyn put in an oar.

'I had hoped,' he said, 'to find some illuminating points in the
conversation to-night.  But it seems as if you treat not only your own
country in a spirit of caricature, but mine as well.  We are a very
young race, and we have the faults of youth; but, then, youth always
has a future.  It was a sort of post-graduate course to come to England
and Europe to absorb some of the lore--or isn't it one of your poets
who speaks of "The Spoils of Time"?  Your past is so rich that
naturally we look to you and Europe for the fundamental things of
civilisation.'

'And what have you found?' asked Elise Durwent.

'Well,' said the American, 'much to admire--and much to deplore.'

'In other words,' said Johnston Smyth, 'he has been to Edinburgh and to
London.'

'That is so,' smiled Selwyn; 'but I don't'----

'All people,' said Smyth serenely, 'admire Edinburgh, but abuse London.
Over here a man will jest about his religion or even his grandfather,
but never about Edinburgh.  On the other hand, as every one damns
London, and as an Englishman is never so happy as when he has something
on hand to grouse about, London's population has grown to some eight
millions.'

'I think, Mr. Smyth,' said Lady Durwent, 'that you are as much a
philosopher as a painter.'

'Lady Durwent,' said the futurist, 'all art is philosophy--even old
Pyford's here, though his amounts almost to theology.'

For a few minutes the conversation drifted in inconsequential channels
until H. Stackton Dunckley becalmed everything with a laborious
dissertation on the lack of literary taste in both England and America.
Selwyn took the opportunity of studying the elusive beauty of Elise
Durwent, which seemed to provoke the eye to admiration, yet fade into
imperfection under a prolonged searching.  Pyford grew sleepy, and even
Smyth appeared a little melancholy, when, on a signal from Lady
Durwent, brandy and liqueurs were served, checking Mr. Dunckley's
oratory and reviving every one's spirits noticeably.

'Mr. Selwyn,' said Mrs. Le Roy Jennings in her best manner, 'after you
have subjected England to a microscopic examination for a sufficient
length of time, you will discover that we are a nation of parasites.'

'I would rather you said that than I, Mrs. Jennings.'

'Parasites,' reiterated the speaker, fixing an eye on some point on the
wall directly between Selwyn and the hostess.  'We sprawl over the
world--why?  To develop resources?  No!  It is to reap the natural
growth of others' endeavours?  Yes!  The Englishman never creates.  He
is the world's greatest brigand'----

'Too thoroughly masculine to be really cruel,' chimed in the
irrepressible Smyth.

'Brigand,' repeated Mrs. Jennings, not deigning the artist so much as a
glance, 'skimming the earth of its surface riches, and rendering every
place the poorer for his being there.'

There was an awesome silence, which no one seemed courageous enough to
break.

'Yes,' said H. Stackton Dunckley finally, 'and in addition England is
decadent.'

'But, Mr. Selwyn'--again the American heard the voice of Elise Durwent,
that quick intensity of speech that always left a moment of startled
silence in its wake--'you have discovered something admirable about
England.  Won't you tell us what it is?'

'Well,' he said, smiling, 'for one thing, no one can deny the beauty of
your women.'

'All decadent nations,' said H. Stackton Dunckley, 'produce beautiful
women--it is one of the surest signs that they are going to pieces.
The Romans did at the last, and Rome and England are parallel cases.
As Mrs. Le Roy Jennings says, they are parasitic nations.  What did the
Romans add to Greek art?  The Greeks had this'--he made an elliptical
movement of his hands--'the Romans did that to it'--he described a
circle, then shrugged his shoulders, convinced that he had said
something crushing.

'So you think English women beautiful, Mr. Selwyn?' said Lady Durwent,
trying to retrieve the conversation from the slough of her inamorato's
ponderosity.

'Undoubtedly,' answered the American warmly.  'It is no doubt the
out-of-door life they lead, and I suppose the moist climate has
something to do with their wonderful complexions, but they are womanly
as well, and their voices are lovely.'

'I smell a rat,' said Smyth, who had in his mouth an unlit cigarette,
which had fastened itself to his lip and bobbed up and down with his
speech, like a miniature baton.  'When a man says a woman's voice is
sweet, it means that she has bored him; that what she has to say
interests him so little that he turns to contemplation of her voice.
This American is a devilish cute fellow.'

A babble of voices took up the charge and demanded immediate
explanation.

'To a certain extent,' said Selwyn stoutly, 'there is much in what Mr.
Smyth says.'

'List to the pigmy praising the oracle,' chanted the artist.

'I do not think,' went on the American, 'that the English girls I have
met are as bright or as clever as the cultured young women of the
continent of America.  In other words, with all her natural charm, the
English girl does not edit herself well.'

'In that,' said H. Stackton Dunckley, 'she reflects the breed.  The
Anglo-Saxon has an instinctive indifference to thought.'

'As soon as an Englishman thinks,' minced Madame Carlotti, 'he leaves
England with its _cattivo_ climate and goes to the Colonies.  _C'est
pourquoi_ the Empire ees so powerful--its brains are in the legs.'

'Come, come,' laughed Selwyn, 'is there no one here but me who can
discover any merit in Old England?'

'Yes,' said Pyford gloomily; 'London is only seven hours from Paris.'

'Ah--_Parigi_!' ejaculated Madame Carlotti with the fervour born of the
feeling in all Latin women that Paris is their spiritual capital.

'And yet,' said Selwyn, after a pause to see if Madame Carlotti's
exuberance was going to develop any further, 'in literature, which I
suppose is the natural art of the Anglo-Saxon temperament, we still
look to you for the outstanding figures.  With all our ability for
writing short stories--and I think we are second only to the French in
that--England still produces the foremost novelists.  In the sustained
effort required in the formation of a novel, England is yet first.  Of
course, musically, I think England is very near the bottom.'

'And yet,' said Johnston Smyth, 'we are the only people in the world
candid enough to have a monument to our lack of taste.'

Every one looked at the artist, who stroked his left arm with the back
of his right hand, like a barber sharpening a razor.

'In that part of London known as Kingsway,' he said, 'there is a
beautiful building called "The London Opera House"!'  He thrust both
hands out, palms upwards, as if the building itself rested on them.
'It stands in a commanding position, with statues of the great
composers gazing from the roof at the passing proletariat emanating
from the Strand.  Inside it is luxuriously equipped, as bents the home
of Opera.'

'Yes,' said the American, as the speaker paused.

Smyth produced a watch from nowhere in particular.  'It is just past
ten,' he said.  'I am not sure whether it is Charlie Chaplin or Mary
Pickford showing on the screen at this hour, at the London Opera House.'

A murmur of applause acknowledged the artist's well-planned climax.  He
looked about with a satisfied smile, then replaced the watch with the
air of pocketing both it and the subject.

'But--you have opera?' said Selwyn wonderingly.

'Of course,' said Smyth; 'and where?  In a vegetable-market.  In Covent
Garden.  Yet England has been accused of hypocrisy!  What other nation
is so candid?'

By one of those unspoken understandings that are the rules of mobs and
dinner-parties, it was felt that the topic was ceasing to be exhaustive
and becoming exhausting.  Lady Durwent glanced, interrogatively about
the table; Madame Carlotti took a hitch in her gown; Norton Pyford
emptied his glass and sat pensively staring at it as if it had hardly
done what he expected, but on the whole he felt inclined to forgive it;
Johnston Smyth made a belated attempt to be sentimental with the
Honourable Miss Durwent, whose lips, always at war with each other,
merely parted in a smile that utterly failed to bring any sympathy from
her eyes; Mrs. Le Roy Jennings took a last sip of coffee, and finding
it quite cold, put it down with a gesture of finality.

'Lady Durwent,' said Austin Selwyn--and the quality of his voice was
lighter and more musical than it had been--'I suppose that a man who
deliberately goes to a country to gather impressions lays himself open
to the danger of being influenced by external things only.  If I were
to base my knowledge of England on what her people say of her, I think
I should be justified in assuming that the century-old charge of her
decadence is terribly true.  Yet I claim to have something of an
artist's sensitiveness to undercurrents, and it seems to me that there
is a strong instinct of race over here--perhaps I express myself
clumsily--but I think there is an England which has far more depth to
it than your artists and writers realise.  For some reason you all seem
to want to deny that; and when, as to-night, it is my privilege to meet
some of this country's expressionists, it appears that none has any
intention of trying to reveal what is fine in your life as a
people--you seek only to satirise, caricature, or damn altogether.  If
I believe my ears, there is nothing but stupidity and insularity in
England.  If I listen to my senses, to my subconscious mind, I feel
that a great crisis would reveal that she is still the bed-rock of
civilisation.'

Madame Carlotti raised her glass.

'To America's next ambassador to England!' she cried.


III.

The momentous evening was drawing to a close.

Rain, in fitful gusts, had been besieging the windows, driven by an
ill-tempered wind that blustered around the streets, darting up dark
alleys, startling the sparks emerging from chimney-pots, roaring across
the parks, slamming doors, and venting itself, every now and then, in
an ill-natured howl.

Inside the refuge of No. 8 Chelmsford Gardens a fire threw its merry
warmth over the large music-room, and did its best to offset the
tearful misery of the November night.

Conversation had dwindled in energy with the closing hour of the
affair, and seizing an auspicious moment, Norton Pyford had reached the
piano, and for twenty minutes demonstrated the close relation of the
chord of C Minor to the colour brown.  Modernist music, acting on
unusual souls as classical music on ordinary souls, stimulated the
flagging conversational powers of the guests, and he was soon
surrounded by a gesticulating group of dissenting or condoning critics.

Selwyn noticed that Elise Durwent had not left her seat by the fire,
and absenting himself from the harmonic debate, he took a chair by hers.

'You are pensive, Miss Durwent,' he said.

She smiled, with a slight suggestion of weariness, though her eyes had
a softness he had not seen in them before.

'I am very dull company to-night,' she said, 'but ever since I was a
child, rain beating against the windows has always made me dreamy.  I
suppose I am old-fashioned, but it is sweeter music to me than Mr.
Pyford's new harmonies.'

He laughed, and leaning towards the fire, rubbed his hands
meditatively.  'You must have found our talk wearisome at dinner,' he
said.

'No,' she answered, 'it was not so bad as usual.  You introduced a note
of sincerity that had all the effect of a novelty.'

Her mannerism of swift and disjointed speech, which broke all her
sentences into rapidly uttered phrases, again annoyed him.  Though her
voice was refined, it seemed to be acting at the behest of a whip-like
brain, and she spoke as if desirous rather of provoking a retort than
of establishing any sense of compatibility.  Yet she was
feminine--gloriously, delicately feminine.  The finely moulded arms and
the gracefulness of body, indicated rather than revealed beneath her
blue gown, intrigued the eye and the senses, just as the swiftly spoken
words challenged the brain and infused exasperation in the very midst
of admiration.  The complicated elements of the girl offered a peculiar
fascination to the eternal instinct of study possessed by the young
American author.

'Miss Durwent,' he said, 'if I was sincere to-night, it was because you
encouraged me to be so.'

'But I said nothing.'

'Nevertheless, you were the inspiration.'

'I never knew a girl could accomplish so much by holding her tongue.'

A crash of 'Bravos' broke from the group around the piano; Pyford had
just scored a point.

'You know,' resumed Selwyn thoughtfully, 'a man doesn't go to a
dinner-party conscious of what he is going to say.  It is the people he
meets that produce ideas in him, many of which he had never thought of
before.'

She tapped the ground with her foot, and looked smilingly at his
serious face.  'It is the reverse with me,' she said.  'I go out to
dinner full of ideas, and the people I meet inspire a silence in me of
unsuspected depth.'

'May I smoke?' asked Selwyn, calling a halt in the verbal duel.

'Certainly; I'll join you.  Don't smoke your own cigarettes--there are
some right in front of you.'

He reached for a silver box, offered her a cigarette, and struck a
match.  As he leaned over her she raised her face to the light, and the
blood mounted angrily to his head.

Though a man accustomed to dissect rather than obey his passions, he
possessed that universal quality of man which demands the weakness of
the feminine nature in the woman who interests him.  He will satirise
that failing; if he be a writer, it will serve as an endless theme for
light cynicism.  He will deplore that a woman's brains are so submerged
by her emotions; but let him meet one reversely constituted, and he
steers his course in another direction with all possible speed.

Selwyn had come to her with a comfortable, after-dinner desire for a
_tête-à-tête_.  He expected flattering questions about his writings,
and would have enjoyed talking about them; instead of which this
English girl with the crimson colouring and the maddening eyes had
coolly kept him at a distance with her rapier brain.  He felt a sudden
indignation at her sexlessness, and struck a match for his own
cigarette with such energy that it broke in two.

'Miss Durwent,' he said suddenly, lighting another match, 'I want to
see you again--soon.'  He paused, astonished at his own abruptness, and
an awkward smile expanded until it crinkled the very pinnacle of his
nose.

'I like you when you look like that,' she said.  'It was just like my
brother Dick when he fell off a horse.  By the way, do you ride?'

'Yes,' he said, watching the cigarette-smoke curl towards the
fireplace, 'though I prefer an amiable beast to a spirited one.'

'Good!' she said, so quickly that it seemed like the thrust of a sword
in tierce.  'You have the same taste in horses as in women.  Most men
have.'

'Miss Durwent'--his face flushed angrily and his jaw stiffened--'I'll
ride any horse you choose in England, and'----

'And break the heart of the most vixenish maiden in London!  You are a
real American, after all.  What is it you say over there?  "Shake!"'

She slapped her hand into his, and he held it in a strong grip.

'But you _will_ let me see you again soon?'

'Certainly.'  She withdrew her hand from his with a firmness that had
neither censure nor coquetry in it, and the heightened colour of her
cheeks subsided with the sparkle of her eyes.

'When?' he said.

'To-morrow morning, if you like.  I shall have horses here at eleven,
and we can ride in the Row, providing you will put up with anything so
quiet as our cattle.'

'That is bully of you.  I shall be here at eleven.'

'I thought all Americans used slang,' she said.

'You are the first English girl I have met,' he answered with
extraordinary venom in his voice, 'who has not said "ripping."'

      *      *      *      *      *      *

Twenty minutes later Austin Selwyn, unable to secure a taxi, tramped
along Oxford Street towards his hotel.  He had just reached the Circus
when the malignant wind, hiding in ambush down Regent Street, rushed at
him unawares and sent his hat roistering into the doorway of a store.
With a frown, Selwyn stopped and stared at the truant.

'Confound the wretched thing!' he said.




CHAPTER VI.

A MORNING IN NOVEMBER.


I.

Austin Selwyn rose from his bed and looked at Berners Street glistening
in a sunlight that must have warmed the heart of Madame Carlotti
herself.  With a lazy pleasure in the process, he recalled the picture
of Elise Durwent sitting in the dim shadows of the firelit room; he
felt again the fragrance of her person as he leaned over her with the
lighted match.  On the canvas of his brain was thrown the rich
colouring of the English girl, with the copper-hued luxury of hair and
the eyes that seemed to steal some magic from the fire; and he saw
again those warring lips, the crimson upper one chiding the passionate
scarlet of its twin.

Idly, while enjoying the unusual dissipation of a pre-breakfast
cigarette, he tried to imagine the course of incident and heredity that
had produced her strange personality.  That there was a bitterness
somewhere in her disposition was obvious; but it certainly could not
have come from the mother, who was the soul of contentment.  He found
himself speculating on the peculiar quality of personality, that
strange thing which makes an individual something apart from others of
his kind, that gift which singles out a girl of ordinary appearance and
leaves one of flawless beauty still wagging her pretty head in the
front row of the chorus.  From that point he began to speculate on the
loneliness of personality, which so often robs its owner of the cheery
companionship of commonplace people.

On the whole, he regretted that he was going to see her again so soon.
Her pertness, which had seemed fairly clever the previous night, would
probably descend to triteness in the morning; he could even see her
endeavouring to keep up the same exchange of short sentences.  Bah!  It
was like a duel with toothpicks.  The stolid respectability of Berners
Street lent its aid to the conviction that the morning would hold
nothing but anti-climax.

And he was poet enough to prefer an unfinished sonnet to one with an
inartistic ending.


II.

Austin Selwyn was twenty-six--an age which has something in common with
almost every one of the seven celebrated by Shakespeare.  Like most men
in their twenties, he had the character of a chameleon, and adapted
himself to his surroundings with almost uncanny facility.  At college
he had been an ardent member of a dozen cliques, even falling under the
egotism of the men who dabbled in Spiritualism, but a clarity of
thought and a strain of Dutch ancestry kept his feet on the earth when
the rest of him showed signs of soaring.

Some moderate wit had said of him at college that he was himself only
twice a day--when he got up in the morning and when he went to bed at
night.  This Stevensonian theory was not quite true, for a chameleon
does not cease to be a chameleon because it changes its colour.

It was perhaps his susceptibility to the many vintages of existence
that had impelled him to write, authors being more or less a natural
result of the economic law of intake and output.  As is the habit of
most young writers, he wrote on various subjects, put enough material
for a two-volume novel into a short story, and generally revelled in
the prodigality of literary youth.  He was prepared to be a social
satirist, a chronicler of the Smart Set, a champion of the down-trodden
masses, or a commercial essayist, according to the first public that
showed appreciation of his work.

Although he had lived in Boston, that city which claims so close an
affinity to ancient Athens (as a matter of fact, has it not been said
that Athens is the Boston of Europe?), he was drawn to the great vortex
of New York, that mighty capital of modernism which sucks the best
brains of an entire continent.  For some time he wrote beneath his own
standard and with considerable success.  Following the example of
several successful New York authors, he plunged into a hectic portrayal
of 'high' society, a set of people that makes one wonder as to the
exact meaning of the adjective.  For a short space he came under the
influence of the studied Bohemianism of 'Greenwich Village,' and wrote
deucedly clever things for the applause of the villagers, then sneered
at American taste because people in Arkansas did not like his work.
Still retaining his love of Greenwichery, he next succumbed to the
money lure of the motion-picture industry, which offered to buy the
picture-rights of his stories, provided he would introduce into them
the elements which go to make up successful American films.

With the prospect of a bank president's income before him, he succeeded
in writing his share of that form of American literature which has a
certain love interest, almost obscured by a nasty sexual diagnosis, an
element of comedy relief, and, above all, a passionate adherence to the
craze of the moment--a work that fades from the mind with the closing
of the book, as the memory of the author's name vanishes almost before
the last sound of the earth dropped upon his coffin.

He knew that there were sincere _literati_ writing of the abiding
things that do not die with the passing of a season, but the clamour of
commercialism drowned their voices.  As though they were stocks upon an
exchange, he heard the cries: 'Brown's getting five thousand dollars a
month writing serials for Hitch's;' 'Smith sold two novels on synopsis
for thirty thousand dollars;' 'Green's signed up with Tagwicks for four
years at two thousand dollars a month writing problem novels.'  Into
the maelstrom of 'Dollars, Dollars, Dollars,' the sensitive brains of
all America were drifting, throwing overboard ideals and aspirations in
order to keep afloat in the swirling foam.

And then--the Fates stooped and touched his destiny with a star.

A New York publisher (one of that little group which has for its motto,
'Art for Art's sake,' not 'Art, for God's sake!') noticed him, and
spoke of literature as an expression of the soul, a thing not of a
season or a decade, but as ageless as a painting.

His ear caught the new song of attainment just as readily as it had
received the chorus of 'Dollars.'  He wrote a novel of New England
life, full of faults, but vibrant with promise; and having gathered
together quite a nice sum of money, he went to England, at the advice
of the before-mentioned publisher, there and elsewhere in Europe to
absorb the less oxygenic atmosphere of older civilisations, which still
gives birth to the beginnings of things.

Twice he had visited Paris.  The first time, with the instinct of the
tourist, he had discovered the vileness of the place--a discovery
fairly easy of accomplishment.  The second time he had ignored the
tourist-stimulated aspect of Paris life, and had allowed his senses to
absorb the soul of the Capital of all the Latins, the laboratory of
civilisation.  And he who has done that is never the same man again.
Germany had ministered to his reason, and Italy to his emotions; but he
found his greatest interest in London, which offered to him an endless
inspiration of changing moods, of vagrant smells, and the effect of a
stupendous drama of humanity.

Under the spell of Europe's ageless artistry and the rich-hued meadows
of England's literary past he had grown humble.  The song of 'Dollars'
was less clamorous than the echo of the ocean in the heart of a
sea-shell.  When he wrote, which was seldom, he approached his
paper-littered desk as an artist does his canvas.  It was the medium by
which he might gain a modest niche in the Hall of the Immortals--or,
failing that, his soul at least would be enriched by the sincerity of
his endeavour.

In that highly artistic frame of mind he suddenly secured the _entrée_
into London Society.  For some reason, as unaccountable as the reverse,
a wave of popularity for Americans was breaking against the oak doors,
and he was carried in on the crest.  The result was not ennobling.  The
dormant instinct of satire leaped to life and the idealist became the
jester.

But then he was twenty-six and most agreeably susceptible to hap-hazard
influence.  Being a Bostonian, he acquitted himself with creditable
_savoir faire_; and being an American, his appreciation of the
ridiculous saved him from the quagmire of snobbery, though he made many
friends and dined regularly with august people, whose family trees were
so rich in growth that they lived in perpetual gloom from the foliage.

Lady Durwent's dinner-party had been an expedition into the artistic
fakery of London, and he would have dismissed the whole affair as a
stimulating and amusing diversion from the ultra-aristocratic rut if
the personality of Elise Durwent had not remained with him like a
haunting melody.

He looked at his watch.  'By Jove!' he muttered; 'it's nine o'clock;'
and hurriedly completing his ablutions, he dressed and descended to
breakfast.


III.

Into the row of splendidly inert houses known as Chelmsford Gardens,
Austin Selwyn turned his course.  A couple of saddle-horses were
standing outside No. 8, held by a groom of expressionless countenance.
From No. 3 a butler emerged, looked at the morning, and retired.
Elsewhere inaction reigned.

Ringing the bell, Selwyn was admitted into the music-room of the
previous night's scene.  The portrait of a famous Elizabethan beauty
looked at him with plump and saucy arrogance.  In place of the
crackling fire a new one was laid, all orderly and proper, like a set
of new resolutions.  The genial disorder of the chairs, moved at the
whim of the Olympians, had all been put straight, and the whole room
possessed an air of studied correctness, as though it were anxious to
forget the previous evening's laxity with the least possible delay.

'Good-morning.'

Elise Durwent swept into the room with an impression of boundless
vitality.  She was dressed in a black riding-habit with a divided
skirt, from beneath which a pair of glistening riding-boots shone with
a Cossack touch.  Her copper hair, which was arranged to lie rather low
at the back, was guarded by a sailor-hat that enhanced to the full the
finely formed features and arched eyebrows.  There was an extraordinary
sense of youthfulness about her--not the youthfulness of immaturity,
but the stimulating quality of the spirit.

'I came here this morning,' began Selwyn vaguely, 'expecting'----

'Expecting a frumpy, red-haired girl with a black derby hat down to her
nose.'

He bowed solemnly.  'Instead of which, I find--a Russian princess.'

'You are a dear.  You can't imagine how much thought I expended on this
hat.'

'It was worth it.  You look absolutely'----

'Just a minute, Mr. Selwyn.  You are not going to tell me I look
charming?'

'That was my intention.'

She sighed, with a pretty pretence at disappointment.  'That will cost
me half-a-crown,' she said.

'I beg your'----

'Yes; I wagered myself two-and-six to a "bob" that you wouldn't use
that word.'

'It is really your fault that I did,' he said seriously.

She curtsied daintily.  'I make money on Englishmen and lose it on
Americans,' she said.  'I have a regular scale of bets.  I give ten to
one that an Englishman will say in the first ten minutes that I look
"topping," five to one on "absolutely ripping" in the first thirty, and
even money on "stunning" in the first hour.'

His face, which had been portraying an amusing mixture of perplexity
and admiration, broke into a smile which encompassed all his features.
'Do all bets cease at the end of the first hour?' he asked.

'Yes, ra-_ther_.  An Englishman never pays compliments then, because he
is used to you.  Isn't it awful seeing people getting used to you?'

'Do they ever?'

'Umph'm.  The only chance of bagging one of the nobility as a husband
is to limit interviews to half-an-hour and never wear the same clothes
twice.  Startle him!  Keep him startled!  Save your most daring gown
for the night you're going to make him propose, then wear white until
the wedding.  An Englishman will fall in love with a woman in scarlet,
but he likes to think he's marrying one who wears white.  Costume, my
dear Americano--costume does it.  Hence the close alliance between the
nobility and the chorus.  But come along; we're snubbing the sunlight.'

With something like intoxication in his blood, he followed his
imperious, high-spirited companion from the house.  He hurried forward
to help her to mount, but she had her foot in the stirrup and had swung
herself into the saddle before he could reach her side.  With less
ease, but with creditable horse-management, Selwyn mounted the chestnut
and drew alongside the bay, who was cavorting airily, as if to taunt
the larger horse with the superior charm of the creature that bestrode
him.

'We'll be back, Smith, at twelve-thirty,' she called; and with the
tossing of the horses' heads, resentful of the restraining reins, and
the clattering of hoofs that struck sparks from the roadway, they made
for the Park.


IV.

London is a stage that is always set.  The youthful Dickens watching
the murky Thames found the setting for his moments of horror, just as
surely as cheery coach-houses, many of them but little changed to this
day, bespoke the entrance of Wellers senior and junior.  London gave to
Wilde's exotic genius the scenes wherein his brilliantly futile
characters played their wordy dramas; then, turning on the author,
London's own vileness called to his.  Thackeray the satirist needed no
further inspiration than the nicely drawn distinction between Belgravia
and Mayfair.  Generous London refused nothing to the seeking mind.  Nor
is it more sparing to-day than it was in the past; it yields its
inspiration to the gloom of Galsworthy, the pedagogic utterances of Mr.
Wells, the brilliant restlessness of Arnold Bennett, and the
ever-delightful humour of Punch.

On this morning in November London was in a gracious mood, and Hyde
Park, coloured with autumn's pensive melancholy, sparkled in the
sunlight.  Snowy bits of cloud raced across the sky, like sails against
the blue of the ocean.  November leaves, lying thick upon the grass,
stirred into life, and for an hour imagined the fickle wind to be a
harbinger of spring.  Children, with laughter that knew no other cause
than the exhilaration of the morning, played and romped, weaving dreams
into their lives and their lives into dreams.  Invalids in chairs
leaned back upon their pillows and smiled.  Something in the laughter
of the children or the spirit of the wind had recalled their own
careless moments of full-lived youth.

Paris, despite your Bois de Boulogne; New York, for all the beauties of
your Central Park and Riverside Drive--what have you to compare with
London's parks on a sun-strewn morning in November?

Reaching the tan-bark surface of Rotten Row, Selwyn and the English
girl eased the reins and let the horses into a canter.  With the motion
of the strong-limbed chestnut the American felt a wave of exultation,
and chuckled from no better cause than sheer enjoyment in the morning's
mood of emancipation.  He glanced at Elise Durwent, and saw that her
eyes were sparkling like diamonds, and that the self-conscious bay was
shaking his head and cantering so lightly that he seemed to be borne on
the wings of the wind.  Selwyn wished that he were a sculptor that he
might make her image in bronze: he would call it 'Recalcitrant Autumn.'
He even felt that he could burst into poetry.  He wished----

But then he was in the glorious twenties; and, after all, what has the
gorged millionaire, rolling along in his beflowered, bewarmed,
becushioned limousine, that can give one-tenth the pleasure of the grip
on the withers of a spirited horse?

Sometimes they walked their beasts, and chatted on such subjects as
young people choose when spirits are high and care is on a vacation.
They were experiencing that keenest of pleasures--joy in the _present_.

They watched London Society equestrianising for the admiration of the
less washed, who were gazing from chairs and benches, trying to tell
from their appearance which was a duke and which merely 'mister'--and
usually guessing quite wrongly.  Ladies of title, some of them riding
so badly that their steeds were goaded into foam by the incessant pull
of the curb bit, trotted past young ladies and gentlemen with
note-books, who had been sent by an eager Press to record the
activities of the truly great.  Handsome women rode in the Row with
their children mounted on wiry ponies (always a charming sight); and
middle-aged, angular females, wearing the customary riding-hat which
reduces beauty to plainness and plainness to caricature, rode
melancholy quadrupeds, determined to do that which is done by those who
are of consequence in the world.

But pleasures born of the passing hour, unlike those of the past or of
anticipation, end with the striking of the clock.  It seemed to Austin
Selwyn that they had been riding only for the space of minutes, when
Elise asked him the time.

'It is twenty minutes to one,' he said.  'I had no idea time had passed
so quickly.'

'Nor I,' she answered.  'Just one more canter, and then we'll go.'

The eager horses chafed at their bits, and pleaded, after the manner of
their kind, to be allowed one mad gallop with heaving flanks and
snorting triumph at the end; but decorum forbade, and contenting
themselves with the agreeable counterfeit, Selwyn and the girl
reluctantly turned from the Park towards home.

The expressionless Smith was waiting for them, and looked at the two
horses with that peculiar intolerance towards their riders which the
very best groom in the world cannot refrain from showing.

'Won't you come in and take the chance of what there is for lunch?' she
said as Selwyn helped her to dismount.

'N-no, thanks,' he said.

She pouted, or pretended to.  'Now, why?' she said as Smith mounted the
chestnut, and touching his hat, walked the horses away.

'There is no reason,' he said, smiling, 'except----  Look here; will
you come downtown and have dinner with me to-night?'

'You Americans are refreshing,' she said, burrowing the toe of her
riding-boot with the point of the crop, 'As a matter of fact, I have to
go to dinner to-night at Lady Chisworth's.'

'Then have a headache,' he persisted.

'Please,' as her lips proceeded to form a negative.

'Some one would see us, and Lady Chisworth would declare war.'

'Then let us dine in some obscure restaurant in Soho.'

'There's no such thing, old dear.  Soho is always full of the best
people dining incog.  Almost the only place where you are free from
your friends is Claridge's.'

'Well'--his nose crinkled at her remark--'then let us go to Claridge's.
Miss Durwent, I know I'm too persistent, but it would be a wonderful
ending to a bully day.  You know you'll be bored at Lady Chisworth's,
and I shall be if you don't come.'

'Humph!'  She stood on the first of the stone steps, her agile
gracefulness lending itself to the picture of healthy, roseate youth.

'Where could we meet?'

'Let me call for you.'

'N-no.  That wouldn't do.'

'Would your mother object?'

'Heavens, no!--but the servants would.  You see, English morality is
largely living up to your servants--and we met only last night.'

'But you will come?'  He crossed his hands behind his back and swung
the crop against his boots.

'Mr. Selwyn,' she said, 'your books should be very interesting.'

'From now on they will be,' he said, 'if'----

'All right,' she interrupted him with something of the staccato
mannerism of the evening before.  'I'll motor down in my little car,
and we'll go to the Café Rouge.'

'Good--wherever that may be.'

'No one has discovered it yet but me,' she said.  'Then I shall have a
headache at four, and meet you outside Oxford Circus Tube at seven.'

'You're a real sport, Miss Durwent.'

'Ah, monsieur'--she smiled with a roguishness that completely unsettled
him for the remainder of the day--'have you no sympathy for my
headache?'




CHAPTER VII.

THE CAFÉ ROUGE.


I.

Monsieur Anton Beauchamp was the proprietor of the Café Rouge in
London.  Monsieur Anton Beauchamp was once proprietor of the Café Bleu
in Paris.

For many years he had cast envious eyes on London.  Did not always his
guests, those strange blonde people with the clothes like blankets, pay
his prices without question?  Did they not drink bad wine and never add
the bill?  _Pardi_! if he could have only English as patrons, madame
and himself could purchase that wine-shop in the Bou' Mich', and never
worry again.

For years the thought of London haunted Anton; and then one day, in a
superb moment of decision, he announced his intention of journeying
thither.  A large entourage followed him to the Gare du Nord, and, with
much the same feelings as those of an explorer leaving for the North
Pole, he bade a dramatic farewell, and almost missed his train by
running back to give a final embrace to Madame Beauchamp.

With no undue mishap he reached London the same night, and next day he
lunched at a famous London restaurant.  At night he dined at a
fashionable establishment in Shaftesbury Avenue.  In both places he
received ordinary food served without distinction, reckoned up the
bill, and found that in each case _l'addition_ was correct--and rushed
madly back to Paris, where he sold the Café Bleu, packed up his
belongings, and explained matters to his wife, doing all three things
simultaneously.

'The dinner,' he exclaimed in a fever of excitement, 'is served--so!
As a funeral.  I order what I like, and the waiter he stands there
_comme un gendarme_, as if it is my name I give.  "Any vegetables?"
demands he.  _Mon Dieu_!  As if vegetables they are no more to him than
so much--so much umbrellas.  I say, "_Garçon, la carte des vins_!" and,
quite correct, he hands it me with so many wines he has not got, just
as in Paris, but--_que penses tu_?--he permits me to order what wine I
choose, so--by myself.  _C'est terrible_!  I give him three pennies and
say, "_Garçon_, for such stupidity you should pay the whole bill."'

Monsieur Beauchamp was a man of shrewdness.  He knew he could not
compete with the established solidity of the Trocadero, the Ritz, the
Piccadilly, or the garishness of Frascati's, so he purchased and
remodelled an unobtrusive building in an unobtrusive street between
Shaftesbury Avenue and Oxford Street, but clear of Soho and its
adherents.  He decorated the place in a rich red, and arranged some
_cabinets particuliers_ upstairs, where, by the screening of a curtain,
Madame the Wife and Monsieur the Lover could dine without molestation
of vulgar eyes.

Monsieur Beauchamp felt himself a benefactor, a missionary.  He argued
that the only reason Londoners were not so flirtatious as Parisians was
lack of opportunity.  He, the proprietor of the Café Rouge, would bring
light to the inhabitants of the foggy city.  To assist in this
philanthropic work he brought with him an excellent cook, who had
killed a dyspeptic Cabinet Minister by tempting him with dishes
intended only for robust digestions, and three young and ambitious
waiters; while madame engaged what unskilled labour was required.

Unobtrusively they opened for business, for he knew that publicity
would spoil his chance of success.  (Once convince a Londoner that he
is one of a select few who know a restaurant, and he will stand an hour
waiting for a table.)  The first customer to enter received such
attention that he brought his family the next night.  Monsieur
Beauchamp issued orders that he should be snubbed.  _Parbleu_! was the
Café Rouge for _families_?

Gradually the justification of Monsieur Beauchamp's policy became
evident.  Ladies of the Chorus brought their admirers there, and to the
former Monsieur Beauchamp paid particular courtesy.  Long study of
feminine psychology had taught him that, whereas a woman may change her
lover, she will not change her favourite café.  Therefore, though the
man may pay the bill, the woman is the one to please.  Artists from
Chelsea would come as well to the Café Rouge, celebrating the sale of a
picture, and drinking plentifully to the confounding of all art
critics.  Also, the _cabinets particuliers_ were the scene of some
exceedingly expensive and recherché dinners--and almost no one added
the bill.  When any one did, Monsieur Beauchamp was mortified, and
invariably dismissed the same waiter on the spot--thereby gaining for
himself and France a reputation for sterling integrity.

'_Ma foi_!  London may be gray,' thought Monsieur Beauchamp, 'but she
pays well.'


II.

One November evening Monsieur Anton Beauchamp's critical eye noted the
entrance of a dark-haired young man in well-fitting evening clothes,
and with him a young lady whose deep-green cloak and white fur round
the shoulders set off to perfection her radiant colouring and
well-poised figure.  Monsieur Beauchamp did not hesitate.  After all,
he was an artist, and subject to inspiration like other men of genius;
so, hurrying downstairs, he waved the waiter aside, and greeted them
with a bow which almost amounted to virtuosity.

'_Bon soir, monsieur et madame_.'  He cast an anxious glance about the
café, which was two-thirds filled.  'This tabil will do?--_Ah, mais
non_!  He grew indignant at the very thought.  '_Pardon, monsieur_,
that one is very nice--_par ici_--_Non, non_!  Ah--perhaps you would
like a _cabinet particulier_?'

The sirenic tone of voice and the gesture of his hands indicated the
seraphic pleasure to be obtained only in one of those secluded spots.

The American turned inquiringly to the girl.

'When I was here before,' she said, 'I was at a table just upstairs to
the right.  Have you one there, Monsieur Beauchamp?'

_Nom d'une pipe_!  She knew him.  And she was beautiful, this English
lady.  As he personally escorted them upstairs, with the importance of
a Lord Chamberlain at a Court function, Monsieur Beauchamp speculated
on the flirtatious potentialities of the young woman.  If she were only
clever enough to be fickle, what a source of profit she might be to the
Café Rouge!  And was she not in appearance much like Mademoiselle
Valerie, for whom a member of the Chamber of Deputies had blown out the
brains of Monsieur P---- de l'Académie Française?

With the assistance of a waiter, he ushered them to a table almost
hidden by a pillar, where a crimson-shaded light sent a soft glow that
was guaranteed to make the most of a woman's eyes.  Monsieur Beauchamp
with his own hands brought them the menu card, while the waiter stood
expectantly, crouched for an immediate start as soon as he received the
signal.  A small waitress appeared with the butter and rolls, and made
her way underneath the arms of the proprietor and the waiter like a tug
running round two ocean liners.  Monsieur Beauchamp could recommend the
_Barquettes Norvégienne_--No?  Madame did not so desire?  Of course
not.  He frowned terrifically at the waiter, who glared ferociously at
the diminutive waitress.  _Morbleu_!  What imbecile suggested
_Barquettes Norvégienne_?  Monsieur Beauchamp mentioned other dishes as
an overture to the meal, waxing increasingly wrathy towards the waiter
on each veto.  Ah! monsieur desired _Consommé Anton_.  The proprietor's
face beamed and his arms were outstretched towards heaven.  That this
gentleman should order _Consommé Anton_, the soup of which he alone
knew the secret, and which had been named after himself!  Truly, the
life of a restaurateur was not without compensations.  He turned on the
waiter--but that worthy had darted away to execute the order.


III.

The soup appeared.  Monsieur Beauchamp stood by with the attitude of an
artist watching the hanging of his first painting in the Academy.

'You might let me see the wine list,' said Selwyn.

Monsieur Beauchamp struck an attitude of horror.  Had it come to this
in the Café Rouge, that a patron must _ask_ for the wine list?
Brandishing his arms, he rushed from the table, almost colliding with
the little waitress, flew downstairs to the very farthest table near
the door, seized a wine card, and puffing generously, arrived with the
trophy at the table, much as Rothschild's messenger must have reached
London with the news that the British were winning at Waterloo.  Having
then succeeded in making the American order a red wine when he wanted
white, Monsieur Beauchamp withdrew in a state of histrionic
self-satisfaction.

With a smile of relief Selwyn looked across the table at the girl.
Even in the soft glow of the lamp, which made for flattery, it seemed
to him that the vivacity of the morning had disappeared, and in its
place was the petulance of the previous evening.  Her eyes, which
seemed when they were riding to have caught something of the alchemy of
the skies, were steady and lighter in shade.  Again he noticed the
suggestion of discontent about the mouth, and the upper lip looked thin
and lacking in colour.

'It is your turn to-night to be pensive,' she said.

'I was thinking,' he answered, 'that it is hardly twenty-four hours
since we met, and yet I have as many impressions of you as an ordinary
woman would give in six months.  For instance, last night when you
entered the room'----

'But, Mr. Selwyn, any girl knows enough to arrive late when there is no
woman within twenty years of her age in the room.  The effect is
certain.'

There was no humour in her voice, but just a tone of weary, world-wise
knowledge.  A look of displeasure clouded his face.

'Surely,' he said, 'with your qualities and appearance, you don't need
such an elaborate technique.'

'In a world where there is so little that is genuine, why should I
debar myself from the pleasure of being a humbug?'

'Come, come,' he said, smiling, 'you are not going to join the ranks of
England's detractors?'

She shrugged her shoulders.  'I'm certainly not going to become a
professional critic like Stackton Dunckley, who hasn't even the excuse
that he's an Irishman; or Lucia Carlotti, who hardly ever leaves London
because her dinners cost her nothing.  But I reserve the right of
personal resentment.'


IV.

They were interrupted by a waiter, who removed the soup-plates with
studied dexterity, and substituted _Tronçon de turbotin Duglère_;
_pommes vapeur_, the dish which had delivered the fatal blow against
the Cabinet Minister's digestive armour.

'Perhaps I am too personal,' resumed Selwyn after the completion of
this task, 'but last night one of the impressions I took away with me
was your critical attitude towards your surroundings.  Then this
morning you were so completely'----

'Charming?'

'----bewitching,' he said, smiling, 'that I thought myself an idiot for
the previous night's opinion.  But, then, this evening'----

'Mr. Selwyn, you are not going to tell me I'm disappointing, and we
just finished with the soup?'

More than her words, the forced rapidity with which she spoke nettled
him.  With bad taste perhaps, but still with well-meant sincerity, he
was trying to elucidate the personality which had gripped him; while
she, though seemingly having no objection to serving as a study for
analysis, was constantly thrusting her deflecting sentences in his
path.  To him words were as clay to the sculptor.  When he conversed he
liked to choose his theme, then, by adroit use of language, bring his
artistry to bear on the subject, accentuating a line here, introducing
a note of subtlety elsewhere, amplifying, smoothing, finishing with the
veneer of words the construction of his mind.  Another quality in her
that troubled him was the apparent rigidity of her thoughts.  Not once
did she give the impression that she was nursing an idea in the lap of
her mentality, but always that she had arrived at a conclusion by an
instantaneous process, which would not permit of retraction or
expansion.  As though by suggestion he could reduce her phrasing to a
_tempo_ less quick, his own voice slowed to a drawl.

'Miss Durwent,' he said, 'you are unique among the English girls I have
met.  I should think that contentment, almost reduced to placidity, is
one of their outstanding characteristics.'

'That is because you are a man, and with a stranger we have our company
manners on.  England is full of bitter, resentful women, but they don't
cry about it.  That's one result of our playing games like boys.  We
learn not to whine.'

'I suppose the activities of your suffragettes are a sign of this
unrest.'

'Yes--though they don't know what is really the trouble.  I do not
think women should run the country, but I do feel that we should have
something to say about our ordinary day-to-day lives.  Man-made laws
are stupid enough, but a man-made society is intolerable.  Just a very
little wine, please.'

For a moment there was silence; then she continued: 'Oh, I suppose if
it were all sifted down I should find that it is largely egotism on my
part.'

He waited, not wanting to alter her course by any injudicious comment.

'Mr. Selwyn,' she said abruptly, 'do you feel that there is a Higher
Purpose working through life?'

'Y-yes,' he said, rather startled, 'I think there is.'

'Sometimes I do,' she went on; 'then, again, I think we're here on this
earth for no purpose at all.  It often strikes me that Some One up
above started humanity with a great idea, but lost interest in us.'

'I think,' he said slowly, 'that every man has an instinctive feeling
sometime in his life that he is a small part of a great plan that is
working somehow towards the light.'

'Yes.  It's a comfortable thought.  It's what makes good Christians
enjoy their dinner without worrying too much about the poor.'

He made no answer, though he was not one who often let an epigram go by
without a counter-thrust; but he could see that the girl was struggling
towards a sincerity of expression much as a frightened horse crosses a
bridge which spans a roaring waterfall, ready to bolt at the first
thing that affrights it.

'Mr. Selwyn,' she said--and for the first time her words had something
of a lilt and less incision--'do you think women are living the life
intended for them?'

'Why not?' he fenced.

'Well, it seems to me that when any living creature is placed in the
world it is given certain powers to use.  You saw this morning how our
horses wanted to race, and couldn't understand our holding them back.
A mosquito bites because that's apparently its job in the world, and it
doesn't know anything else.  I was once told that if animals do not use
some faculty they possess, in time Nature takes it away from them.'

'You are quite a student of natural history, Miss Durwent.'

'No--but every now and then mother unearths a man who teaches us
something, like last night.'

He acknowledged the compliment with a slight inclination of his head.
The waiter leant expectantly beside him.

'To descend from the metaphysical to the purely physical,' he said,
glancing in some perplexity at the terrific nomenclature of Monsieur
Beauchamp's dishes, 'do you think we might take a chance on this
_Poulet reine aux primeurs; salade lorette_?  I gather that it has
something to do with chicken.'

'It's rather artful of Monsieur Beauchamp to word it so we poor English
can get that much, isn't it?'

'Yes.  He apparently acts on the principle that a little learning is a
common thing.'


V.

As Selwyn gave the necessary order to the waiter, a noisy hubbub of
laughter from an adjoining _cabinet particulier_ almost drowned his
words.  There was one woman's voice that was rasping and sustained with
an abandon of vulgarity released by the potency of champagne.

Elise Durwent looked across the table at her companion.  'Are you bored
with all my talk?' she said.  'You Americans aren't nearly so candid
about such things as Englishmen.'

'On the contrary, Miss Durwent, I am deeply interested.  Only, I am a
little puzzled as to how you connect the usual functions of animals
with woman's place in the world.'

With an air of abstraction she drew some pattern on the table-cloth
with the prongs of a fork.  'I don't know,' she said dreamily, 'that I
can apply the argument correctly, 'but--Mr. Selwyn, when I was a child
playing about with my little brother "Boy-blue"--that was a pet name I
had for him--I was just as happy to be a girl as he was to be a boy.  I
think that is true of all children.  But ask any woman which she would
rather be, a man or a woman, and unless she is trying to make you fall
in love with her she will say the former.  That is not as it should be,
but it's true.  Yet, if we are part of your great plan working towards
the light, we're entitled to the same share in life as you--more, if
anything, because we perpetuate life and have more in common with all
that it holds than men have.  There, that is a long speech for me.'

'Please don't stop.'

There was a howl in a man's voice from the noisy _cabinet particulier_,
followed by a laugh from the same woman as before, which set the teeth
on edge.

'That woman in there,' she went on, 'will partly show what I mean.  In
the beginning we were both given certain qualities.  She has lost her
modesty through disuse; I'm losing my womanliness and power of sympathy
for the same reason.  She's more candid about it, that's all.  When
Dick and I were youngsters I dreamed of life as Casim Baba's cave full
of undiscovered treasures that would be endless.  Now I look back upon
those days as the only really happy ones I shall ever have.'

'You are--how old?'

'Twenty-three.'

'You will grow less cynical as you grow older,' he said, from the
altitude of twenty-six.

'I agree,' she said.  'As, unlike the Japanese, we haven't the moral
courage of suicide, I shall get used to the idea of being an
Englishman's wife; of living in a calm routine of sport, bridge,
week-ends, and small-talk--entertaining people who bore you, and in
turn helping to bore those who entertain you.  In time I'll forget that
I was born, as most women are, with a fine perception of life's
subtleties, and settle down to living year in and year out with no
change except that each season you're less attractive and more petty.
After a while I shall even get to like the calm level of being an
Englishman's wife, and if I see any girl thinking as I do now, I'll
know what a little fool she is.  That's what happens to us--we get used
to things.  Those of us who don't, either get a divorce, or go to the
devil, or just live out our little farce.  It is a real tragedy of
English life that women are losing through disuse the qualities that
were given them.  That is why an American like you comes here and says
we do not edit ourselves cleverly.'

The rapid succession of sentences came to an end, and the colour which
had mounted to her cheeks slowly subsided.


VI.

'I feel,' he said, 'that I can only vaguely understand what you mean.
But is it not possible that you are looking at it too much from the
standpoint of an individualist?'

'Women are all individualists,' she broke in; 'or they are until
society breaks their spirit.  This lumping of people into generations
and tuning your son's brain to the same pitch as his medieval
ancestors' doesn't interest women--that's man's performance.  The great
thing about a woman is her own life, isn't it?  And the great event in
a woman's life is when she has a child--because it's _hers_.  This
class and family stuff comes from men, because their names are
perpetuated, not ours.  There is no snobbery equal to men's; it is more
noticeable with women, because it isn't instinctive with them, and they
have to talk to show it.'

'Then,' said Selwyn, 'in addition to an Irish Rebellion, we may look
for one from English women?'

'Yes.  I don't know when, but it will come.'

He produced a cigarette-case.  'Would you care for a cigarette now?' he
asked.

'No, thanks.  But you smoke.'

'Poor England!' he said in pretended seriousness, tapping the table
with the end of the cigarette, 'with two revolutions on her hands, and
neither party knowing what it wants.'

'We may not know what we want,' she said, 'but, as an Irishman said the
other day, "we won't be satisfied till we get it."  If the rebellion of
our women doesn't come, I prophesy that in a couple of thousand years,
when the supermen inhabit the earth, they will find a sort of land
mermaid with an expressionless face, perpetually going through the
motion of dealing cards or drinking tea.  Then some old fogy will spend
ten years in research, and pronounce her an excellent example of the
extinct race "_Femina Anglica_."'

'As one of the tyrants who wishes you well,' said Selwyn, after a laugh
in which she joined, 'may I be permitted to know what women want--or
think they want?'

'Mr. Selwyn, revolutions never come from people who think.  That is why
they are so terrible.  The unhappiness of so many Englishwomen comes
from the life which does not demand or permit the use of half the
powers they possess.  Nor does it satisfy half their longings.  Such a
condition produces either stagnation or revolution.  Our ultimatum
is--give us a life which demands all our resources and permits women
unlimited opportunity for self-development.

'And if the men cannot do this?'

'The women will have to take charge.'

'And when does the ultimatum expire?'

She shrugged her shoulders.

'When will the next great earthquake be?'


VII.

The noise of the party in the _cabinet particulier_ had been growing
apace with the reinforcement of champagne-bottles.  The strident
laughter of the women dominated the lower level of men's voices, and
there was a constant clinking of glasses, punctuated by the occasional
drawing of a cork, which always whipped the gaiety to a feverish pitch.
Monsieur Beauchamp rubbed his hands rather anxiously.  He would have
preferred a little more intrigue and not quite so much noise.  But,
then, was it not a testimony to his wine?--and certainly there would be
an excellent bill.

One of the men in the party called on some one for a song.  There was a
hammering on the table, a promise of a kiss in a girl's voice that
trailed off into a tipsy giggle, the sound of shuffling chairs and
accompanying hilarity as the singer was apparently hoisted on to the
table.  There came a crash of breaking glass as his foot collided with
some dinner-things.

Monsieur Beauchamp winced, but consoled himself with the reflection
that he could charge what he wished for the damage.  The voices were
hushed at the order of the singer, who was trying to enunciate the
title of his song.

'I shall shing,' he said, with considerable difficulty, '"Moon, Moon,
Boo--(hic)--Booful Moon," composhed by myself at the early age of
sheven months.  It ish very pash--pashesh--it ish very shad, so, if ye
have tearsh, pre--(hic)--pare to shed 'em now.'

There was loud applause, which the singer interrupted by commencing to
sing in a bass voice that broke into falsetto with such frequency that
it was difficult to tell which voice was the natural one.  He started
off the verse very stoutly, but was growing rather maudlin, when,
reaching the chorus, he seemed to take on a new lease of vitality and
bellowed quite lustily:


  'Moon, Moon, boo-oo-oo-ooful Moon,
  Shining reshplendantly, radiant an' tenderly;
  Moon, Moon, boo-oo--(hic)--booful Moon--
  Tell her I shy for her, tell her I die for her,
  Booful, BOO-OO-ooful Moon.


'Now then, fellow Athenians, chorush, chorush!'  With an indescribable
medley of discordant howling the party broke into a series of 'Moon,
Moon, boo-oo-ooful Moon,' which came to an abrupt ending as the singer
fell back, apparently unconscious, in the arms of his friends.  There
was a murmuring of voices, and a waiter was sent for some water to
revive the young man.

Considerably disgusted at the ending to the incident, Selwyn, who had
turned to look towards the _cabinet particulier_, once more sought his
companion's eyes.

Her face was white; there was not a vestige of colour in the cheeks.

'Miss Durwent,' he gasped, 'you are not well.'

'I am quite well,' she answered quickly, but her voice was weak and
quivering.  'I--I thought I recognised the singer's voice.  That was
all.'

The curtain of the _cabinet particulier_ was drawn aside, and two
youths in evening-dress emerged, supporting between them the
dishevelled singer, who was miserably drunk, and whose hat almost
completely obscured his right eye.  They were followed by three girls
with untidy hair, whose flushed, rouged faces had been made grotesque
by clumsy dabs of powder.

The singer's hat fell off, and Monsieur Beauchamp, who was hovering
about with the bill, had just stooped to recover it, when Selwyn heard,
a suppressed cry of pain from Elise Durwent.  Thrusting her chair away
from her, she made for the emerging party, and halted them at the top
of the stairway.

'Dick!' she said breathlessly.  'Dick!'

The drunken youth raised his heavy eyelids and looked with bewildered
eyes at his sister.  One of the girls tried to laugh, but there was
something in the insane lightness of his eyes and the agony of hers
that stifled the ribaldry in its birth.  His face was as pale as hers,
a pallor that was accentuated by dark hair, matted impotently over his
forehead.  But there was a careless, debonair charm about the fellow
that made him stand out apart from the other revellers.

'Hello, sis!' he muttered, trying to pull himself together.  'My li'l
sister Elise--friends of mine here--forget their names, but jolly good
fellosh--and ladies too; nice li'l ladies'----

'Bravo, Durwent!' cried one of his friends, emitting a dismal howl of
encouragement.

'Dick!  Boy-blue!'  The breathy intensity of her voice seemed to rouse
some latent manhood in her brother.  He stiffened his shoulders and
threw off his two supporting friends--a manoeuvre which enabled
Monsieur Beauchamp to present his trifling bill to the more sober of
the two.  'Why aren't you at Cambridge?'

'Advice of conshul,' he muttered.  'Refushe to answer.'  He shook his
head solemnly from side to side.

With a swift gesture she turned to the American.  'This is my brother,'
she said, 'and I know where his rooms are in town.  If you will bring
my cloak, I'll get him to my car and take him home.'

Selwyn nodded his understanding.  He hardly knew what words he could
speak that might not hurt her.

'Listen, Dick dear,' she said, stepping very close to him and taking
his hand in hers.  'Please don't say anything.  Just come with me, and
I'll take you to your rooms.'

Through the befuddled wits of the young fellow came the sound of the
voice that had dominated his childhood.  He smelt the freshness of the
long grass in the Roselawn meadows; with his disordered imagination he
heard again the clattering of horses' hoofs on the country-road, and he
saw his sister with her copper-tinted hair flung to the breeze.  With a
look of mixed wonder and pain in the yellowish blue of his eyes, he
allowed her to take his arm, and together they went slowly downstairs
and through the throng of diners craning their necks to see, while the
party he had left emitted snorts and howls of contempt.

Selwyn reached the door in time to help the drunken youth into the car,
and then placed the cloak about Elise's shoulders.  She put out her
hand.

'Good-night,' she said.

'But you will permit me to come?' he said.  'I could be of assistance.'

'No--no,' she said tensely, 'please--I want to be alone with him.  Have
no fear, Mr. Selwyn.  Poor old Dick would do anything for me.'

He held her hand in his.  'Miss Durwent,' he said, 'I cannot express
what I mean.  But if this makes any difference at all, it is only that
I admire you infinitely more for'----

'No--please--please say nothing more,' she cried with a sound of pain
in her voice.

'But may I come and see you again?'

She withdrew her hand and pressed it against her brow.

'Yes.  I--I don't know.  Good-night.  Please don't say any more.'  The
words ended in a choking, tearless sob.  She stepped into the car, and
with no further sign to him threw in the clutch and started away.

Huddled in the corner, his pale face glistening in the lamplight of the
street, the Honourable Richard Durwent lay in a drunken sleep.




CHAPTER VIII.

INTERMEZZO.

It was several months later--May 1914, to be precise--when Austin
Selwyn made the determination, common to most men, to remain in for an
evening and catch up in his correspondence.

After the manner of his species, he produced a small army of letters
from various pockets, and spreading them in a heap on his desk,
proceeded to answer the more urgent, and postpone the less important to
a further occasion when conscience would again overcome indolence.  For
an hour he wrote trivial politenesses to hostesses who had extended
hospitality or were going to do so; there was a reply to a literary
agent, one to a moving-picture concern, an answer to a critic, and a
note of thanks to an admirer.

Having disposed of these sundry matters, he sat back in his chair and
read a long letter that had been enclosed in an envelope bearing the
postage-stamp of the United States of America.  At its finish he
settled himself comfortably, lit a cigar, and, squaring his shoulders,
wrote a reply to the Reverend Edgerton Forbes, Rector of St. Giles'
Episcopal Church, Fifth Avenue, New York:


'LONDON, _May 12, 1914_.

'MY DEAR EDGE,--I've been supplying your friend the Devil with all
sorts of cobblestones recently, but, my dear old boy, if I had written
you every time I intended to, you would have had no time to prepare
those knock-out sermons of yours.

'In your letter you hint at possible heart entanglements for me.  Has
it not been said that to a writer all women are "copy"?  Even when he
falls in love, your author is so busy studying the symptoms that he
usually fails to inform the lady until she has eloped with some other
clown.

'In fairness, however, I must admit that you were partly correct in
your surmise.  I almost fell in love last November with a girl who
invariably angered me when I was with her, but clung to my mind next
day like an unfinished plot.  I saw her quite frequently up to
February, when I went to the Continent, but have not called on her
since my return.

'I met her first at her mother's town house, where there were several
people who admitted their greatness with an aplomb one was forced to
admire.  This girl sort of sat there and said nothing, but her silence
had a good deal more in it than some of the talk.  We had our first
chat that night by the fire, next morning went riding in Rotten Row,
and had dinner together the same night.  Fast travelling, you say?  On
paper, yes; but actually I don't know the girl any better now than the
night I met her.  She's a strange creature--self-willed, fiery, sweet,
and sometimes as clever as your Ancient Adversary.  But friendship with
her makes me think of the days when I was a kid.  My great hobby was
building sky-scrapers with blocks, and very laboriously I would erect
the structure up to the point when "feeding-time" or "washing-time" or
"being shown to the minister" used always to intervene.  When I
returned, the blocks had always fallen down.  Well, friendship with
Elise (pretty name, isn't it?) is not unlike my experience with the
blocks.  You can leave her, firmly convinced that at last you are on a
basis of real understanding; and two or three days later, when you meet
her again, you find all the blocks lying around in disorder.  Instead
of a friend, one is an esteemed acquaintance.  The only way to win her,
I suppose, would be to call at dawn and stay until midnight.  It would
be a bit trying, but I get awfully "fed up" (as they say over here)
with being constantly recalled to the barrier.

'Of course, you old humbug, I can see you pursing your lips and saying,
"Does Austin really love her?  If he did, he would be unable to see her
faults."  It's an exploded theory that love is blind.  Good heavens! if
a man in love can see in a girl beauty which doesn't exist, is there
any reason to suppose he will be unable to see the faults that _do_?

'But, candidly, I don't think I am in love with this young lady.  I
might be if I were given half a chance; but, then, emotional icebergs
were always my specialty.  I meet a dozen girls who treat me with a
tender cordiality that is touching; then there comes into my course one
who expresses a sort of friendly indifference, and there I stay
scorching my wings or freezing my toes--whichever figure of speech you
prefer.

'She makes me think of a painting sometimes, one that changes in
appearance with the varying lights and shadows of the sky.  But, Edge,
given the exact light that her beauty needs, she is a masterpiece.  In
some strange way her personality has given me a new pleasure in Corot
and Diaz.  It is difficult to explain, but it is so.  I feel my powers
of description are inadequate really to picture Elise to you.  She is
truly feminine, and yet when she is with other women her unique gift of
personality makes them _merely_ feminine.  "Lordy, Lordy," as a nigger
of mine used to say, "dis am becomin' abtuse."

'As a matter of fact, the girl is a result of conflicting elements of
heredity.  I haven't met her father, but I gather that he is a good old
Tory of blameless respectability, and has a deep-seated disbelief in
evolution.  On the other hand, the girl's mother is rather a buxom and
florid descendant of a vigorous North of England family, the former
members of which, with the exception of her father, were highly
esteemed smugglers.  The lady's grandfather, Elise tells me, was known
as "Gentleman Joe," and was as adventurous a cut-throat as a small
boy's imagination could desire.

'Well, Mr. Parson, you can imagine what happened when these conflicting
elements of heredity were brought together.  In the language of
science, there was one negative result and two positive.  The first
mentioned is a son Malcolm, whom I have not met.  He has a commission
in the cavalry, is a devil at billiards, can't read a map, and rides
like a Centaur.

'Of the positive results it seems to me I may have already mentioned
one--Elise.  The other is Richard, the tragedy of the family.  Poor
Dick was practically kicked out of Eton for drunkenness when he was
about sixteen.  For the past year or so he has been at Cambridge, but
he got in with a bad set there, and after several warnings has been
"sent down"--or, in ordinary language, expelled.  It appears that the
old combination of "booze" and women got the better of him, though
there's something oddly fine about the fellow too.  He was hitting an
awful pace at Cambridge, and when he tried to pass off a fourth-rate
chorus-girl as the Duchess of Turveydrop, the axe descended.  As the
masquerading duchess was rather noisy and very "elevated," you can see
that there must have been complications.

'Of course, his governor was furious, and, settling a very small
allowance on the poor beggar, turned him out of the family home, and
forbade him to ever darken, &c., &c.  (see, split infinitive and all,
any "best seller" of a few years back).

'Does this seem at all incongruous to you?  These so-called aristocrats
bring a son into existence, and, providing he's a decent-living,
rule-abiding chap, he is sheltered from the world and kept for the
enriching of their own hot-house of respectability.  But--if one of
them upsets the ash-can and otherwise messes up the family escutcheon,
the father says, "You have disgraced our traditions.  Get thee hence
into the cold, outside world.  After this you belong to it."

'Damned generous of paterfamilias, isn't it?  Only, as one of the cold,
outside world, I can't help wondering why, if Milord is going to keep
his good apples for himself, we should have to accept the rotten ones.

'Concerning Cambridge--I spent a weekend there recently with Doug
Watson of Boston, who is taking Engineering.  Cambridge is quite a
little community, as separate from the rest of England as the Channel
Islands.  On the Saturday evening I was there Watson took a punt, and
with considerable dexterity piloted me along the Cam, with its green
velvet banks and overhanging trees.  The river is an exquisite thing,
and there was a sensuous drowsiness in the beauty of the hour before
dark.

'The lawns from the backs of the colleges slope down to the river, and
as we passed along we noticed group after group of students drinking
coffee made in percolators in their possession.  There was something
almost pastoral in the sight of those young Britishers in such complete
repose.  Perhaps I should have enjoyed it all without question if it
had not been that, a week before, I had visited a poor little
Nonconformist preacher who labours on an empty stomach to a little
congregation in a chain-making district.  Edge, the sights I saw there
were not good for any man to see and remain quiet.  Women work at the
fires when pregnant, and fuddle themselves with beer at night; the men
are a shiftless lot, who spend their lives hand-in-hand with poverty
and think only of beer, "baccy," and loafing.  You know I'm no
prohibitionist, but I hate to see beer the goal of men's ambitions.  In
one school there was a class with forty "backward" children.  That's
the kinder word, Edge, but the real one is "imbecile."  Think of
it--forty human destinies that must be lived out to a finish!  They
tell me that conditions are improving there.  I hope so, in Heaven's
name.

'It was that visit I had in mind when punting along the Cam.  A man is
a fool to pit his little mind against so vast and wonderful an edifice
as a great university like Cambridge, but one thought which occurred
more than once to me was whether or not a man can be considered
educated if he be ignorant of human misery existing beyond the college
gates.  In the Scottish universities the Professor of Latin is called
Professor of Humanity.  I wonder, Edge, if the time is not ripe for a
chair of Humanity in a wider sense in all universities.

'On Sunday we went to one of the churches, and, with eleven others,
managed to present a formidable congregation of thirteen.  The
preacher's prayer, which he read, was a superb piece of work.  He
started off with the King and the Royal Family, passed on to titled and
landed gentry, after them the higher orders of the clergy, leaders of
the navy, the army, and all those in more or less authority, then the
lower orders of the clergy, and after several categories I have
forgotten, he reached the commoners, and (in an appropriate tone of
voice) hoped we should live in peace, one with another.

'Think of it, Edge, in this enlightened age!  I wanted to go up to him
after the service and ask him why he had left out the minor poets, but
Doug stopped me--which is perhaps just as well.  He might have added a
prayer for Americans after the commoners.

'Sometimes I think that the English Church is losing its grip.  I don't
mean that snobbery of the kind I have described is common, but in the
development of Church character it seems to me that the truth of
Christ's birth into a humble walk of life is drifting steadily farther
from the clerical consciousness.  The timid snobbery which permeates so
much of English life, and reaches its wretched climax in the terms
"working class" and "lower classes," finds condonement in the ranks of
the clergy.  Even in its humorous aspect, when Mrs. Retired Naval
Officer starts to swank it over Mrs. Retired Army Officer (senior
service, deah boy, y'know), and so on down the line, the local rector
too often takes an active part in seeing that the various grades are
punctiliously preserved.  Of course, there are glorious exceptions to
all this, and they are the men who count.

'I suppose at home we are just as bad, and that even so democratic a
preacher as yourself doesn't take supper on Sunday night with the
poorest parishioner.  Perhaps living in a strange country makes a man
see many things he would not notice in his own.

'To finish with Cambridge--we joined a party of two large punts on
Sunday afternoon, and with about twelve college chaps and local
(approved) girls we went for a picnic up the river.  The girls were
fairly pretty and terrifically energetic, insisting upon doing an equal
share in the punting, and managing to look graceful while they
manoeuvred the punts, which were really fair-sized barges.  And when we
reached the picnic-place, they made all the preparations, and waited on
us as if we were royal invalids.  Bless their hearts!  Edge, to restore
a man's natural vanity, commend me to life in England.  Coming home we
played the gramophone, and, with appropriate flirtation, floated nearly
the whole way to the holding of hands and the hearing of music.

'And, theologian as you are, if you deny the charm of that combination,
I renounce you utterly.

'Just one more Cambridge thought.  (This letter has as many false
endings as one of your sermons.)  There were quite a number of native
students from India in attendance, and I noticed that these men, many
of them striking-looking fellows, were left pretty much to themselves.
The English answer when spoken to, and offer that well-bred tolerance
exerted by them so easily, but the Indian student must feel that he is
not admitted on a footing of equality.  I'm not certain that the dark
races can be admitted as equals; but what effect on India will it have
if these fellows are educated, then sent back with resentment
fermenting their knowledge into sedition?  It may be another case where
the Englishman is instinctively right in his racial psychology; or,
again, it may be a further example of his dislike to look facts
squarely in the face.

'Of course, we have our own racial problem, and have hardly made such a
success of it that we can afford to offer advice.

'Well, Edge, this letter has run on to too great a length to permit of
any European treatment.  That will have to wait.  Of course, I have
paid several visits to Paris, and understand as never before the
saying: "Every man loves two countries--his own and France."

'Edge, why is it that people who travel always have the worst
characteristics of their nationality?  On the Continent one sees
Englishmen wearing clothes that I swear are never to be seen in
England, and their women so often appear angular and semi-masculine,
whereas at home--but, then, you know what an admirer I am of English
women.  And our own people are worse.  Tell me: at home, when a
gentleman talks to you, does he keep his cigar in his mouth and merely
resonate through his nose?  Or is that a mannerism acquired through
travelling?

'But enough, old boy.  This has covered too vast an acreage of thought
already.  Oh yes--about my writing.  I have been doing very little
recently, but can feel the tide rising to that point where it will of
necessity overflow the confines of my lethargy.  I have had the honour
of meeting several of the foremost writers here, and there is no
question about it, they are doing excellent work.  But I wish that I
could feel a little more idealism in their work.  The whole country
here is parched for the lack of Heaven's moisture of idealism.  People
must have an objective in their lives, and the Arts should combine with
the Church in creating it.

'Of course, there is an amazing amount of drivel written over here,
most of which, I think, would never get past the office-boy of an
American publication.  The English short story and the English
music-hall are things to be avoided.

'Before I end, have you seen Gerard Van Derwater recently?  I heard
that he joined the diplomatic service at Washington after leaving
college.  I often think of him with his strange pallor, but suggestion
of brooding strength.  Did it ever strike you that every one respected
him, and yet he really never had a close friend?  It always seemed to
me that he carried about with him a sense of impending tragedy.  Find
out what he is doing, and let me know.

'Well, old boy, in another few months I shall pack up and return to
America, and once more woo the elusive editor.  I am looking forward to
our sitting by your fireside and, through the cloud of tobacco-smoke,
weaving again our old romances.  I am really proud of you, Edgerton,
and know that you must be a tremendous power for good.

'A letter any time addressed c/o The Royal Automobile Club, Pall Mall,
will find me.--As ever, your old chum,

'AUSTIN SELWYN.'


      *      *      *      *      *      *

The writer addressed an envelope, inserted the letter, sealed and
stamped it, then yawned lazily.  Gathering his outgoing correspondence
and the old letters, he took his hat and sauntered into the street,
conscious of having done his duty--also that he had unearthed some
thoughts the existence of which he had not suspected beneath the
surface shrubbery of everyday existence.




CHAPTER IX.

A HOUSE-PARTY AT ROSELAWN.


I.

As is the habit of the year, June followed May, and in its turn gave
way to the yellow hours of July.  Lady Durwent, wearying of London and
its triumphs, returned to Roselawn to share the solitary, rural reign
of her husband.

As she drove in a sumptuous car through the village and into the wide
confines of the estate she purred with contentment.  Men doffed their
caps, women curtsied, and the country-side mingled its smile with
theirs.  It was not unlike the return of a conqueror from a campaign
abroad, and after the incognito forced by London on all but the most
journalised duchesses, it was distinctly pleasant to be acknowledged by
every one she passed.

In this most amiable of moods she dined with her husband, and was so
vivacious that, looking at her over his glass of port, he thought how
little she had changed since, years before, she had first affected his
subnormal pulse.  Together they wandered over the lawns, and he showed
the improvements wrought since her last visit.  She gave the
head-gardener the benefit of her unrestricted smile, and shed among all
the retainers a bountiful largesse of good-humour.

Still noting the beauties of Roselawn, they discussed their children.
She learned that Malcolm was on leave from the --th Hussars, and was
golfing in, and yachting off, Scotland with scions of the Scottish
nobility.  The mention of Dick brought a pang to her heart, and a cloud
that marred the serenity of her husband's brow.  Lord Durwent regretted
the necessity of his actions, but the boy had proved himself a 'waster'
and a 'rotter.'  He had been given every chance, and had persistently
disgraced the family name.  If he would go to Canada or Australia, he
could have money for the passage; otherwise----

After that imperialistic pronouncement, Lord Durwent turned to more
congenial topics, and spoke of additions to the stables and
improvements to the church.  His wife answered mechanically, and it was
many minutes before the heart-hunger for the blue-eyed Dick was lulled.
She said nothing, for the development of her sons' lives had long since
passed from her to a system, but in the seclusion of their country home
the domestic tragedy made a deeper inroad on her feelings than it had
done in London.

It was perhaps not unnatural that they barely spoke of Elise at all.
She was visiting a county family in the north, and would be home in a
couple of days.  As there was no immediate suitor on the horizon, what
more was there to be said of the daughter of the house?

Next morning Lady Durwent was still amiable, but rather dull.  The
following day she was frankly bored.  On Sunday, during the sermon, she
planned a house-party; and so, in due course, invitations were issued,
and accepted or regretfully declined.  She possessed sufficient sense
of the fitness of things to refrain from transplanting any of her
_unusual_ varieties from their native soil, but asked only those
persons whose family connections ensured a proper tone to the affair.

Perhaps it was just a kindly thought on her part to ask Austin Selwyn.
It may have been the desire of having an author to lend an exotic touch
to the gathering.  Or, being a woman, she may have wanted an American
to see her at the head of the table in two widely different settings.

Perhaps it was all three motives.


II.

In preparation for the arrival of guests, 'a certain liveliness'
pervaded the tranquil atmosphere of Roselawn.  The tennis-court was
rolled and marked; fishing-tackle was inspected and repaired; in view
of the possibility of dancing, the piano was tuned; bridge deficiencies
were made good at the local stationer's; and gardeners and gamekeepers
hurried about their tasks, while flapping game-birds signalled to
trembling trout that the enemy was mobilising for the yearly campaign.

Roselawn differed little from the hundreds of English country-houses,
the seclusion and invulnerability of which have played so great a part
in forming the English character.  A lodge at the entrance to the
estate supplied a medieval sense of challenge to the outside world, and
the beautifully kept hedges at the side of the mile-long carriage-drive
gave that feeling of retirement and emancipation from the world so much
desired by tranquil minds.

It was the setting to produce a poet, or a race of Tories.  Once within
the embracing solitude of Roselawn, the discordant jangling of common
people worrying about their long hours of work or the right to give
their offspring a decent chance in the world became a distant murmur,
no more unpleasant or menacing than the whang of a wasp outside the
window.

Not that the inhabitants of Roselawn were any more callous or selfish
than others of their class, for the record of the Durwent family was by
no means devoid of kindly and knightly deeds.  Tenantry lying ill were
always the recipients of studied thoughtfulness from the lord and lady
of the place, and servants who had served both long and faithfully
could look forward to a decent pension until death sent them to the
great equality of the next world.

If one could trace the history of the Durwent family from the
beginning, it would be seen that among the victims of a hereditary
system there must be numbered many of the aristocracy themselves.
Caricaturists and satirists, who smear the many with the weaknesses of
the few, would have us believe that the son of a lord is no better than
the son of a fool; yet, if the vaults of some of the old families were
to unfold their century-hugged secrets, it would be seen that, as
Gray's country churchyard might hold some mute inglorious Milton, so
might these vaults hold the ashes of many a splendid brain ruined by
the genial absurdity of 'class' wherein it had been placed.  A boy with
a title suspended over his head like the sword of Damocles may enter
life's arena armed with great aspirations and the power to bring a
depth of human understanding to earth's problems, but what chance has
he against the ring of antagonists who confront him?  Flunkeyism,
'swank,' the timid worship of the peerage, the leprosy of social
hypocrisy, all sap his strength, as barnacles clinging to the keel of a
ship lessen her speed with each recurring voyage.

It is not that the hereditary system injures directly; its crime lies
in what it engenders--the pestilence of snobbery, which poisons nearly
all who come into contact with it, titled and untitled, frocked and
unfrocked, washed and unwashed.  The very servants create a comic-opera
set of rules for their below-stairs life, and the man who has butlered
for a lord, even if the latter be the greatest fool of his day, looks
with scorn upon the valet of some lesser fellow who, perchance, is
forced to make a living by his brains.


III.

The house at Roselawn was large, and, with its ivy-covered exterior,
presented a spectacle of considerable beauty.  The front was in the
form of a 'hollow square,' creating an imposing courtyard, and giving
the windows of the library and the drawing-room ample opportunity for
sunshine.  From these windows there was a charming vista of well-kept
lawns, margined with gardens possessed of a hundred tones of exquisite
colour.  At the back of the house the windows looked out on receding
meadows that melted into the solidarity of woods.

The drawing-room (Lady Durwent tried to designate it 'the music-room,'
but the older name persisted) had all the conglomeration of contents
which is at once the charm and the drawback of English country homes.
Furniture of various periods indulged in mute and elegant warfare.
Scattered in graceful disorder about the room were relics procured by
an ancestor who had been to Japan; there was a Spanish bowl gathered by
Lord Dudley Durwent; there was an Italian tapestry, an Indian tomahawk,
a Chinese sword that had beheaded real Chinamen, all procured by Lord
Dingwall Durwent in the eighteenth century.  There was a massive Louis
Seize table and a frail Louis Quinze chair; a slice of Chippendale
here, and a bit of Sheraton there; portraits of ancestors who fought at
Quebec, Waterloo, Sebastopol, and a very military-looking gentleman on
a terrific horse, who had done all his fighting in Pall Mall clubs.
There were 'oils' purchased by Durwents who liked to patronise the
arts, and 'waters' by Durwents who didn't like oils.

And year after year, generation after generation, the ancient
drawing-room received its additional impedimenta without so much as a
creak of protest.

In the impressive seclusion of Roselawn, therefore, the house-party
began to gather.  They were an admirably assorted group of people who
never objected to being bored, providing it was accomplished in an
atmosphere of good breeding.  The soothing balm of the Roselawn meadows
offered its potency of healing to fatigued minds or weary bodies, but,
like the fragrance of the unseen flower, it was wasted on the desert
air.  Lady Durwent's guests had not been using either their brains or
their bodies to a point where honest fatigue would seek healing in the
perfume of clover.  If a hundred gamins from Whitechapel's crowded
misery had been brought from London and let loose in summer's
sweet-scented prodigality, the incense of fields and flowers might have
brought sparkle to young eyes dull with the wretchedness of poverty,
and colour to pale, unnourished cheeks.  But Lord and Lady Durwent,
denying themselves the luxury of such a treat, asked people who lived
in the country to come and enjoy the country.

The pleasure of their guests was about as keen as would be that of a
party of bricklayers invited by a fellow-labourer to spend a Saturday
with him laying bricks.


IV.

To the insatiable curiosity of Austin Selwyn the party presented an
infinite chance for study, as well as an unlooked-for opportunity to
meet Elise Durwent under circumstances which should either cement their
friendship or else demonstrate its utter impracticability.

He listened to the chat of men who did the same things all the year
round with the same people, and he wondered a little at their
persistency in conversing at all.  They rarely disagreed on anything,
partly because they were all of the same political faith, and it seemed
an understood thing that, so far as it was humanly possible, no one
would introduce any subject which would entail controversy.  When
Selwyn, who was almost too thorough a believer in the productive powers
of fiction, used to drop conversational depth-bombs, they treated him
with easy tolerance as one who was entitled to his racial
peculiarities.  Sometimes they would even put to sea clinging to the
raft of one of his ideas, but one by one would grow numb and drop off
into the waters of mental indifference.  They had a nice sense of
satire, and it was a delight for the American to indulge in an easy,
inconsequential banter which was full of humour without being labelled
funny; but it used to fill him with sorrow to see many of his best
controversial subjects punctured by a lazily conceived play of words.
He felt that, coming from the New World, he was in a position to give
knowledge for knowledge, but his fellow-guests were impervious to his
geographical qualifications, and persisted in their pleasant task of
rolling vocabulary along the straight grooved channels of their
well-bred thoughts.

The women were less of a type, but their little lives were so lacking
in horizon that they seemed to live in a perpetual atmosphere of
personalities.  As pretty much the same topics of conversation did them
for a whole season, they were not unlike a travelling theatrical
company producing the one show wherever they went.  One woman
occasioned some mirth to Selwyn by her familiarity with the obscure
royalties of Europe, whom she thrust forward on every possible
occasion.  On dowager-duchesses and retired empresses she was without
parallel, and she went through life expressing perpetual regret that
she had not known you were going to Ruritania, because she would have
insisted upon your calling on her friend the Empress Lizajania.

It was perhaps an unfortunate circumstance that had brought together a
group of women none of whom was artistically accomplished, although
they were by no means lacking in social charm.  Music for them was not
a refreshing stream which ran by the road of everyday life, but
something which was to be heard at the Opera, and which enjoyed a close
alliance with sables and diamond tiaras.  Pictures were of the Academy,
and, like all the best people, they invariably said, 'Have you seen
this year's show at Burlington House?  My dear, it's frightful.'  Nor
did they neglect literature in their curriculum.  Though literature
lacks a yearly exhibition, such as is possessed by music and painting,
they made it a subject for gossip, and denounced H. G. Wells as a
'bounder.'  'I never read him, Mr. Selwyn,' said the obscure-royalist
person.  'My cousin the Duchess of Atwater met him, and says--well,
really, she says he's quite impossible.'

With a mixture of wonder and amusement Selwyn watched the spectacle of
these people of more than average education and intelligence contenting
themselves with a perpetual routine of small-talk and genteel
insularity, and he wondered how it was that a race so gifted with the
blessed quality of humour could evolve a state of society offering such
a butt to the shafts of ridicule.

He liked Lord Durwent, whose unfailing gentleness and courtesy would
have stamped him as a gentleman in any walk of life.  Although his mind
was comparatively unimpressionable to new ideas, it was saturated with
the qualities of integrity and fairness, and in his attitude towards
every one of his guests there was an old-world dignity, born of the
respect in which he held both himself and them.  The study of this man
moving contentedly about his daily tasks, never making any one's day
harder by reason of his passing that way, was the first jolt Selwyn had
received in his gathering arraignment against English social life.  By
way of contrast he pictured certain successful gentlemen of his
acquaintance in America, and the vision was not flattering to his
national self-esteem.

He also enjoyed the refreshing vitality of Lady Durwent, who never
quite lost her optimism no matter how tight was the grip of good form;
and he admired without stint the devotion of every one, regardless of
sex, to sport.  Throughout the day there were constant expeditions that
necessitated long, invigorating hours in the open air; and it seemed to
the American that they were never so free from affectation, that the
comradeship between the men and the women was never so marked, as when
they were indulging their wise instinct for out-of-door sports.

He had been at Roselawn a couple of days before he had a chance to do
more than observe Elise Durwent as one of the party.  She had been his
partner at tennis and bridge, and a dozen times he had exchanged light
talk with her, but there was always about her the defensive shield of
impersonal cordiality.  When he spoke to her it was almost in a drawl,
but no matter to what a lackadaisical level he reduced his voice, her
replies were always punctuated by a retort that had in it the sense of
sting, as Alfio in _Cavalleria Rusticana_ accompanies his song with the
crack of a driving-whip.

He watched her with the men of the party, and wondered at their
good-natured endurance of her sharpness, as reckless as it was
disturbing; and he saw that her inclusion among the women made them
less at ease and disinclined to chatter.  No matter what group she
joined, she was never of it; and even when it was obvious that she was
doing everything in her power to reduce her personality to the pitch of
the others, her individuality branded her as something apart.

Studying her, partly subconsciously and partly with the keen
observation prompted by the attraction she held for him, Selwyn began
to feel the loneliness of the girl.  Not once did he see the melting of
eyes which comes when one person finds close affinity in the
understanding of a friend.  When she spoke at the table her suddenness
always left a silence in its wake.  At bridge her moves were so
spasmodic that, when opposite dummy, she seemed to play the two cards
with a simultaneous movement.  The same mannerisms were in her outdoor
games, a second service at tennis often following a faulty first so
rapidly that her opponent would sometimes be almost unaware that more
than one ball had been played.

Selwyn's original feeling of exasperation mellowed to one of genuine
pity in contemplation of her solitary life--a life directed by a
restless energy that only grew in intensity with the deepening
realisation of her purposelessness.  Yet she was so confident in her
bearing, and so capable of foiling with repartee any approach of his,
that he contented himself with a studied politeness that was no more
personal than the grief of an undertaker at a funeral.


V.

One evening, after dressing for dinner, Selwyn found that he had
half-an-hour to fill in, and as the smell of grass was scenting the
air, he sauntered from the house and strolled across the lawn to a path
which led to the trout-stream.

His mind was drowsy with a thousand half-formed ideas that lazily lay
in the pan of his brain waiting the reveille of thought.  A skylark
twitted earth's creatures from its aerial height.  A cow, munching in
endless meditation on its unfretful existence, emitted a philosophic
moo.

Selwyn smiled, and let his mind wander listlessly through the fields of
his impressions.  He thought of Britain, and wondered what there is in
the magic of that little island that fastens on one's heart-strings
even while the brain is pounding insistent criticism.  For the first
time the insidious beauty of Roselawn's tranquillity was cloying the
energy of his mind--a mind that never gave him rest, but was always
questioning and seeking the truth in every phase of human endeavour.
The peacefulness of the twilight hour was lulling his mental faculties,
and the perfumes of summer's zenith were stirring his senses like music
of the Nile.

As though he were picturing inhabitants of another world, he conjured
to his vision the feverish traffic of New York, deluged with human
beings belched from their million occupations into the glare of
lunch-hour.  It gave him a strange sensation of being among the gods to
be able to look at the lowering sun and know that at the same moment it
held New York in the pitiless heat of midday. . . .  And he wondered
dreamily why people lived such a mockery of existence as in its
towering streets.  The pastoral atmosphere was so perfect, so
completely soothing in its cool fragrance of evening, that he thought
if he could only remain there, away from the conflict of the world, he
could write of such things as only poets dream and painters see.

He had readied the stream, and was about to retrace his steps, when he
heard the rustle of a dress, and coming round a bend in the path he saw
Elise Durwent.  She was in an evening gown that looked oddly exotic in
those surroundings, and, still in a haze of reverie, he stood in
perplexed silence until she stopped opposite him.

'Have I interrupted the muse?' she said.

'On the contrary, you have awakened it.  I was just thinking how vivid
you looked with that setting of overhanging bushes and the background
of fields.  I--I think it must have been your gown that gave such a
quaintly incongruous effect.'

'And, of course, there is nothing incongruous in a dinner-jacket near a
trout-stream?  If I were an artist I should paint you, and call the
picture "Despondency."'

'Well,' he smiled, 'that would be an improvement on most Academy
titles.  An ordinary artist would simply name it "Young Gentleman by
Trout-Stream."  Haven't you often gone through a gallery picturing all
sorts of dramatic meanings in paintings, only to have your illusions
shattered by the catalogue?'

She nodded.  'You have expressed no surprise at my coming,' she said
abruptly.  'Are women in the habit of tracking you in this way?'

'I'm sorry,' he answered, lazily thrusting his hands into his pockets.
'As a matter of fact you are never very far from my thoughts.  Perhaps
that is why I felt no surprise.'

'How are you enjoying your visit?'

'Tremendously.'

'How do you like the guests?'

'Is this a catechism, Miss Durwent?'

She shrugged her shoulders and pulled a leaf from a bush.  'I was
wondering,' she said, 'whether they bored you as much as me.'

'Why,' he said with a slight laugh, 'to be frank, people never bore me.
The moment they become tedious they are of interest to me as a study in
tediousness.'

'Just the same,' she said quickly, 'as when a woman interests you she
becomes an object of analysis.  I wish I could detach myself like that.'

'And yet,' he said gently, wondering at the intensity of her eyes, 'I
should have thought you possessed the gift of detachment to a greater
degree than I.  You always seem separate and distinct from your
associates.'

She said nothing in reply, and as if by tacit agreement they started
back along the path.  He did not break the silence, feeling that words
might be provocative of a retort that would dispel the growing feeling
of mutual confidence.

'No,' she said, after a long pause, 'I do not possess the power of
detachment.  It's just that I don't mix well.  Have you read Robert
Service's poem about the men that don't fit in?'

'Yes.'

'Well, it's far worse for the women who don't.  A man can go out and
try to find some place for himself.  We have simply to stay and endure
things.'

Half in compassion he watched her from the corner of his eye, but again
refrained from saying anything.  He felt intuitively that she was
trying to break down the barrier of impersonality, but he knew that she
must do it in her own way of timid starts and quick withdrawals.

Although her movements were more restricted by her gown than when she
wore ordinary walking-garments, her vitality and limitless energy lent
a lilt to her step, and even touched the shoulders with a suggestion of
restless virility.  When she walked there was an imperious tilt to her
head; but no matter how carefully planned her toilette, or how cleverly
her coiffure might have been arranged by her maid, there was nearly
always some stray bit of colour or carelessly chosen flower that
combined with her nature in a suggestion of outlawry: the same instinct
of rebellion that had dominated her brother Dick during their
childhood.  Inside the house she would sometimes look, in her quickly
changing moods, as if she were some creature of Nature imprisoned
within the walls.

Selwyn wondered if heredity, in one of its strange jests, had recalled
the spirit of the smuggler ancestor and recast it into the soul of the
girl.

They were nearing the house, when, emerging upon a clearing, they came
to a rustic bench looking across a short field lined with shrubbery.

'Let us sit down a minute,' she said.  'We can hear the dinner-gong
from here.'

He took his seat beside her, and dreamily watched the yellow rays of
the sun casting their receding tints along the bushes opposite them.
It was strangely quiet, and the hum of insects seemed like a soft
orchestral accompaniment to the crickets' song.

'It is not very sporting of me, Mr. Selwyn,' she said softly, but with
her old staccato mannerism, 'to force my mood on you like this.  I did
it once before--that dreadful night at the Café Rouge--and I know that
you must think it is just selfishness on my part that makes me so
unhappy.  But--you know I never had a real friend--except little
Dick--and I felt to-night as if I had lost all my courage about life.
That's why I followed you.  I knew you would be patient and kind.'

'My dear girl,' said Selwyn gently, speaking almost listlessly for fear
the smouldering power of retort should be fanned into being, 'for
months I have been hoping that some day we should be able to talk like
this, as friends.  Perhaps it was my fault, but there always seemed a
sort of third-person-singular attitude in our talk, as if we were
speaking at each other, which served to block our friendship from
becoming anything of value to each other.  Naturally I have seen that
you are not happy, though there have been moments when you were the
very personification of light-hearted ness, and I have known for a long
time that the motif of your whole nature is resentment.  Believe me,
Miss Durwent, if I could be a friend--and I mean that to the last
ditch--I should be deeply grateful for the privilege.'

'Thanks,' she said simply, and placing her hand in his, let it remain
there.

The hot blood of his impressionable nature mounted to his cheeks, and
his heart was aflame with a sudden intoxication of desire.  But
chivalry told him how much it had cost this girl, whose whole being
rebelled at the thought of being physically conquered, to show such a
mark of confidence.  And reason warned him that any triumph he might
obtain would be only for the moment.  He watched the flight of a hawk
in the sky--and his lips were parched and hot.

'For a long time,' she said, 'I have had a growing sensation of
suffocation in life.  It's stifling me.  When I look ahead and see
nothing but this kind of life--visiting, visiting, entertaining,
entertaining, listening to that endless talk in London--well, I think I
understand why some women go to the devil.  At least there's something
genuine about sin.'

A rabbit leaped from a bush opposite as though it bad seen something
terrifying, and scampered madly across the field to some burrowed
refuge by a great oak.  Selwyn felt the hand in his tighten
convulsively.

'Look!' she cried.  'Austin--look!'

Her face blanched with sudden alarm.  He sprang to his feet.

'What is it?' he cried.

'The bush--there--where the rabbit darted out.'

He looked at the spot indicated by her trembling hand, but the
dwindling sunlight had just passed it, and he could see nothing but a
clump of shrubbery.

'It was a man,' she said, her voice shaking querulously.  'I saw his
face.  He was crouching there and watching us.'

Selwyn frowned.  'Some poacher fellow,' he said, 'that's all.  At any
rate, I'll make sure.'

He started for the bush, when, with a tearful laugh, she stopped him,
her hands clinging to his arm.

'No--no,' she said swiftly, 'it's nothing.  It was just my nerves.
There is no one there.  The rabbit startled me.'

He hesitated momentarily, then, turning to her, gripped her arms with
his hands.  A great feeling of pity for the high-strung girl welled up
in him, and he wished that it were possible to impart some of his own
strength to her.  'Elise,' he began hoarsely, his whole being in a
cloud of passion through which his brain slashed its lightning shafts
of warning--'Elise'----

The hall gong, growing in a clamant intensity, rang out on the quiet
air.  With the lightness of a fawn she released herself from his grip,
and gathering her skirts in her hand, moved towards the path.  'Come
along,' she cried; 'we shall be late for dinner.'

He followed her slowly, his hands in his pockets and his mind besieged
with countless thoughts.  As he crossed the lawn he looked up.

From a window in the tower of Roselawn there was shining an angry,
blood-red reflection of the sun's dying moments.


VI.

It was a few minutes after midnight when the party at Roselawn retired
to their rooms.  There had been an impromptu dance, following some
spirited bridge, and there was more than the usual chaffing and
laughter as the guests dispersed to the various wings of the house.

Tired with the many events of the day, the American quickly undressed,
and soothed by the comfort of cool sheets, lay in that relaxation of
mind and body which prefaces the panacea of sleep.  With half-closed
eyes and drowsy semi-consciousness he heard the sounds of life growing
less and less in the roomy passages of Roselawn, as his mind lingered
over the burning memory of Elise's proximity a few hours before.  He
felt again the perfume of her hair and the radiant freshness of her
womanhood, with its inexplicable sense of spring-time.  And memory,
with its power of exquisite torture, recalled to his mind the
questioning eyes and the trembling, beckoning lips.

The soft chime of a clock downstairs sounded the passing of another
hour.  Its murmuring echo died to a silence unbroken by any sound save
that of the summer breeze playing about the eaves and towers of the
house.

Minutes passed.  His thoughts blurred into the gathering shadows of
sleep.

Of a sudden he was awake, his eyes staring into the dark, his whole
body nervously, acutely, on the alert.  He had heard a cry--of a
nightjar--but so strange and eerie that it made him hold his breath.

The call was repeated.  An owl answered with a creepy cry of alarm.
Selwyn muttered impatiently at the trick played upon him by his nerves,
and turning over, was about to settle again to slumber, when he heard a
door softly opening.  Light footsteps passed in the hall, stopping at
each creaking board as though suspicious that some one might hear; then
their sound was lost in the thick carpet of the stairway.

For a minute there was complete silence.  He heard from below the
cautious opening of the side-door leading to the lawn.

Wondering what mischief was on foot, he rose from his bed, and peering
through the window, tried to penetrate the gloom.  A sullen sky kept
the stars imprisoned behind deep banks of clouds, and only the trees,
by reason of their solid blackness, were discernible in the darkness of
the night.  Slipping on a dressing-gown, he stealthily left his room,
and creeping downstairs, found the open door.  Emerging on the lawn, he
looked quickly about.

Beneath a near-by tree he saw a woman in white, and the figure of a man
pleading for something.  Suddenly Selwyn saw the woman take some
article from around her neck and hand it to the man.  The fellow took
it, and seemed to be turning away, when, with a suppressed sob, she
caught him in her arms, murmuring incoherent endearments through her
tears.

The black scudding clouds left the sky-clear for a moment overhead--and
Selwyn felt a contraction of pain in his heart.

The woman was Elise, and the man--her brother Dick.




CHAPTER X.

GATHERING SHADOWS.


I.

Breakfast at Roselawn was a studiously inconsequential meal.  Places
were set as usual by the servants, but the viands and the paraphernalia
necessary for their preparation were placed on a separate table in the
alcove by the great window overlooking the lawn.  Having performed this
duty, the servants did nothing more; but one could not help feeling
that they were just outside the door, like a group of prompters, ready
to render instantaneous assistance should the amateurs falter.

Lord Durwent made a kindly and efficient supervisor of the commissariat
table, and--there was no question of it--could boil an egg with any one
in the county.  And the guests plying between the source of supply and
the breakfast-table proper created a vagabondish camping-out air of
geniality that did much to dispel the natural stiffness of the morning
intercourse.  As the meal had no formal opening, every one arrived at
any time during the breakfast period, and though constant apologies
were offered for the frequent interruptions to Lord Durwent's own meal,
it could be seen that his enjoyment of buffet proprietorship was almost
a professional one.

Lady Durwent's part in the function was to supervise the coffee, and
ask each guest how he or she had slept, expressing regret that the
night had not been cooler, warmer, calmer, or fresher, according to the
polite customs of social dialogue at breakfast.

At nine-fifteen the papers used to arrive from the village, always
causing a flutter of excitement.  The sense of solitude at Roselawn
made the outside world something so remote and apart that there was
genuine curiosity to discover what the deuce it had been doing with
itself during the house-party's retreat.

Lord Durwent read the _Morning Post_ as a sort of 'prairie oyster' or
'bromo-seltzer.'  It settled him.  There was something about that
journal's editorial page and its dignified treatment of events that
made Roselawn seem the embodiment of British principle.  Being a man
who prided himself on a catholicity of view-point, he also subscribed
to the _Daily Mail_--that frivolous young thing that has as many
editions as a _débutante_ has frocks, and by its super-delicate
apparatus at Carmelite House can detect a popular clamour before it is
louder than a kitten's miaow.

As a concession to the ladies of the household, he took, in addition,
the _Daily Sketch_ and the _Daily Mirror_, those two energetic
illustrated papers, which, benefiting from the remarkable geographical
fact that every place of consequence in England is exactly two hours
from London, are able to offer photos of riders in Rotten How, bathers
at Brighton, rowers at Oxford, and foreign monarchs walking at Windsor,
the very morning after all these remarkable persons have astonished the
world by riding, bathing, rowing, or walking.

But to Lord Durwent these papers and the _Daily Mail_ were but
interludes.  The _Morning Post_ was the real business of life, and
after reading through its solid columns of type, he enjoyed the
sensation of somehow having done something for his country.


II.

It was just before the arrival of the morning papers that Selwyn
descended to the dining-room.  Helping himself to porridge, he answered
Lady Durwent's polite conventional questions.

'And _how_ did you sleep?' asked his hostess, putting into the inquiry
that artistic personal touch which made it seem as if this were the
first time she had asked the question, and he the first guest to whom
it had been propounded.

'Lady Durwent,' he answered, smiling, 'I haven't the faintest idea.'

'Then,' said his hostess, triumphantly explaining the obvious, 'you
must have slept well.'

Selwyn thought that when he answered Lady Durwent's query a quick look
of relief had passed across the face of Elise.  It was for her peace of
mind he had lied, as into the hours of dawn he had lain awake, trying
to unravel the meaning of the nocturnal scene.  He knew that her
prodigal brother had been forbidden the ancestral home, but it was
hardly necessary that he should lie in hiding like a negro slave
dreading the hounds upon his track.  And yet, as he recalled the sudden
glimpse of Dick's face, Selwyn remembered that there had been a hunted
look in the dark-shadowed, luminous eyes.  Vaguely he felt that this
new development would hinder the understanding reached by Elise and
himself during the evening.  If only he could go to her and offer his
help or solace; or if she would come to him frankly and let him share
the unhappy secret, whatever it was, it might prove a bond of
comradeship instead of another element to deepen her consciousness of
aloofness.

Still churning these various thoughts, he smiled his greetings to her,
and affecting an easy unconcern, took his part in the fashionable
agricultural conversation which marks the morning intercourse of
country-living gentle-folk.  If it had not been that the pigs mentioned
were Lord Fitz-Guff's, and the cabbages Lady Dingworthy's--and the
accents of the speakers beyond question--Selwyn could have imagined
that he was sitting around Hank Myer's stove in Doanville, N.Y.,
listening to the gossip of the local Doanvillians on earth's produce.

'Ah,' said Lord Durwent, sighting a messenger from over the egg-timer,
'here are the papers.'

Directly afterwards the butler entered with the four morning journals,
solemnly presented them to his master (with a little more dignity than
a Foreign Minister displays in handing the ambassador of an enemy
country his passports), then made his exit with his eyes sedately
raised, to avoid noting more than was necessary of the 'behind-stage'
aspect of his domain.

'Hello!' said Lord Durwent, perusing the _Morning Post_; 'what's this?
Austria has delivered an ultimatum to Servia.'

'What!' cried one of the ladies; 'over that unpronounceable
assassination?'

'Dear me!' said the woman who kept record of retired royalties, 'that
will upset my dear friend Empress----'

But her voice was lost in the clamour, as every one, deserting
breakfast, crowded about Lord Durwent, and half in jest demanded to
know what the ramshackle empire had to say for itself.

In a voice that grew tremulous with anger, the host read the details,
point by point, and as the seriousness of the thing broke upon the
hearers, even the very lightest tongues were for the moment stilled.

With a frown the nobleman looked up as he reached the end of the
ultimatum, in which one nation, for its pride, demanded that another
should hand over its honour, debased and shackled.

'It is infamous,' said Lord Durwent.

'I tell you what,' said a bland youth named Maynard, who was always in
high spirits at breakfast, bored at lunch, 'frightfully bucked' by a
cup of tea at four, and invariably sentimental after dinner; 'it would
do these nasty little Balkans a lot of good to hold 'em all under water
for about three minutes--what?'

'But this is more than a Balkan quarrel,' said Lord Durwent.

'Balkan quarrels always are,' said the youth amiably.

In a chorus of quick questions and answers, in which surmise and
conjecture played ducks and drakes with fact, the party divided into
two camps, the majority taking the stand that it was a local affair and
would lead to nothing; the minority, led by a retired army captain
called Fensome, reading a dark augury for the future.  In the midst of
all the chaffing Selwyn noticed, however, that the placidity of decorum
had been dropped, and both men and women were leaning forward in the
unaccustomed stimulus of their brains rallying to meet a new and
powerful situation.

The men did not lose that note of easy banter which seemed the rule
when women were present, but in the faces of the little group who
contended that danger was ahead he could detect the stiffening of the
jaw and the steadying of the eye which come to those who see events
riding towards them with the threat of a prairie fire driven by a wind.

'But, good heavens!' said Selwyn, in answer to some one's prophecy that
war would result, 'surely the big nations can stop it.  Germany and you
and America--we three won't let Austria cut Servia's throat in full
daylight.'

The retired army captain turned a monocle on him.  'You have been in
Germany, Mr. Selwyn?'

'Yes, just recently.'

'Did you ever hear them toasting _Der Tag_?  My friend, it has
arrived.--Durwent, old boy, if you will excuse me, I think I shall go
to town at noon.  If my old bones aren't lying, the thing which a few
of us fossils have been preaching to deaf ears has come to pass, and
there may be a job for a belivered old devil like me yet.'

'But,' cried Lady Durwent, whose easily roused theatrical instinct gave
her the delightful sensation of presiding at a meeting of the Cabinet,
'what have we to do with Austria and Servia?'

'Hear, hear,' said the bland youth.  'Let 'em hop aboard each other if
they like.  I think it would be deucedly splendid for us to have
another war; we're all fed up--aren't we?--with just enjoying
ourselves.  But I don't see how we can intrude into those blighters'
little show.'

'Exactly,' said Selwyn; 'it's an isolated incident in European affairs.
In what possible way can it lead to a rupture between Britain and
Germany, as Captain Fensome here predicts?'

The officer referred to shrugged his shoulders.  'It's fairly simple,'
he said.  'If, as I think, Germany is behind all this, Servia will
appeal to Russia; and remember that the Great Bear is mother to all the
Slavs.  There will, of course, be jockeying for position, bluff,
bravado, and all the rest of it; but France is bound to act with
Russia, and with all that explosive hanging around it will be strange
if some spark doesn't fall among it.'

'But what has that to do with England?'

'Nothing and everything.  The greatest hope of maintaining peace lies
with Great Britain.  If we had the army we should have, I don't think
there would be a war; but, thanks to our ostrich temperament, we are
reduced to a handful of men and our action is robbed of everything but
merely moral strength.'

'But that is a tremendous factor,' said Selwyn.

'Yes,' admitted the other dryly; 'but I prefer guns.'

'Then you don't think Britain powerful enough to steady the situation
if it comes?'

'N-no.  Not unless'----  The monocle dropped from the speaker's eye,
and with annoying coolness he paused to replace it.  'Do you think
America will swallow her doctrine and throw in her lot with us?'

Selwyn bit his lip to keep himself from too impetuous an answer.  For
the first time he felt an envy for the cool imperturbability of the
Island Race.

'If you ask me,' he said, 'whether America will plunge into war at the
bidding of a group of diplomats who shuffle the nations like a pack of
cards, then I say no.  If you older nations over here allow this thing
to come to a crisis with a rattling of swords and "_Hock der Kaiser!_"
and "Britannia Rules the Waves," count us out.  But should the occasion
arise when palpable injustice is being done, and the soul of Britain
calls to the soul of America that Right must be maintained, then the
Republic that was born--if you will permit me to say so--born out of
its resentment against injustice will act instantly.'

'Supposing,' said the other, 'that Germany invades Belgium?'

'But--I understand that Germany has guaranteed Belgium's neutrality.'

The ex-officer showed no signs of having heard him, but shook his head
impatiently as one does when annoyed by a fly.  'Supposing,' he
repeated, 'that Germany invades Belgium.'

'In that case,' said Selwyn sternly, 'America will be the first to
protest.'

'To protest?'

'And fight,' said the American, swallowing a desire to hurl a plate at
the monocle.

'You will pardon me,' said Lord Durwent, 'but I do not think we can
expect America to become mixed up in this thing.  She has her own
problems of the New World, and it is too much to hope that she is going
to come over here and become embroiled in a European conflict.'

'But, dad,' said Elise Durwent, speaking for the first time, 'if, as
Mr. Selwyn says, it is clear that a wrong is being committed, America
will insist upon acting.'

'Oh, I don't know,' broke in the youth who was always lively at
breakfast, but who was beginning to be bored; 'it's one thing to get
waxy about your own corns, and quite another when they're on some other
blighter's foot--what?  I mean, you chaps over there got awfully hot
under the collar when dear old Georgius Rex--Heaven rest his
soul!--tried to jump down your throat with both spurs on and gallop
your little tum-tums out.  But the question is, does it hurt in the
same place if old Frankie-Joseph of Austria pinks Thingmabob of Servia
underneath the fifth rib--what, what?'

'Is Britain great enough for such a situation?' asked Selwyn,
repressing a smile.  'Would she accept Belgium's crisis as her own?'

'Oh, that's another thing,' said the young man a little uncomfortably.
'We've signed the bally thing, and of course we'll play the game,
and'----

'As Maynard says,' interrupted the former army man, 'it's a bigger
thing for America than for us.  Mind you, I don't say we need America
to help us to make war, but we do need her help if war is to be
averted; and any move of such a nature on her part demands what you
author fellows would call "a high degree of altruism."  How's that,
Durwent, for a chap who never reads anything but the _Pink Un_?'

'Oh, well,' said Lady Durwent complacently, 'it's probably all a storm
in a teacup, anyway.  Some Austrian diplomat has been jilted for a
Servian, I suppose.  Isn't that the way wars always happen?' and she
sighed heavily, recalling to her mind the classic features of H.
Stackton Dunckley.

'That's what I say,' said the bright youth of the morning splendour.
'Why make a horse cross a bridge if it won't drink?  Here goes--heads,
a European war; tails, another thousand years of peace.--Ah, tough
luck, Fensome, old son; it's tails.'

'Then let's begin the thousand years with some tennis,' cried Elise,
whose eyes were sparkling, 'immediately after breakfast.'

'Shall us?  Let's,' cried the talkative Maynard.  'So lay on,
comrades--the victuals are waiting--and "damned be he that first cries,
'Hold, enough!"'


III.

With an animated burst of chatter the house-party had given itself over
to a thorough enjoyment of the remainder of breakfast.  Ultimatums and
the alarums of war vanished into thin air, like mists dispelled by the
sun.  The serious face of the ex-officer and the unwonted air of
distraction on Lord Durwent's countenance were the only indications
that the morning was different from any other.  Tongues and hearts were
light, and airy bubbles of badinage were blown into space for the
delectation of all who cared to look.

It was during a fashionable monologue of the Court-Circular lady that
Maynard, the man of moods, who was sitting next to Selwyn, leaned over
and whispered, 'Get hold of the _Sketch_.  It's on your right.  Pretend
you're looking at the pictures.  I've got the _Mirror_.'

Wondering what asinine prank was in the young man's mind, but not
wanting to disturb the monologuist by untimely controversy, Selwyn
reached for the _Sketch_, and assumed a deep interest in the very
latest picture of London's very latest stage favourite who could
neither sing, dance, nor act, and was tremendously popular.

'Excuse me, Lady Durwent,' said the gilded youth when a lull permitted
him to speak, 'but would you pass the _Daily Mail_, please?'

'My dear Horace,' said Elise, 'you haven't taken to reading the _Mail_?'

'No, dear one.  Heaven forbid!  I merely write for it.'

'What!'  There was an _ensemble_ of astonishment.

'Ra-ther.  I sent their contributed page a scholarly little thing from
my pen entitled "Should One Kiss in the Park?"  If it's in I get three
guineas, and I'm going to start for Fiji to escape old Fensome's war.'

'Mr. Selwyn,' said Lady Durwent, passing the journal along, 'you have a
rival.'

With an air of considerable embarrassment the fair-haired contributor
to newspapers opened the pages of the _Daily Mail_, but protesting that
he was too bashful to endure the gaze of the curious, he begged
permission to retire to the library, there to search in privacy for his
literary child.

'I say, Selwyn,' he said, 'you come along too if you're through
pecking.  Nothing like having the opinion of an expert, even if he is
jealous.'

With a promise to return immediately and read the effort aloud, the two
men left the table and adjourned to the adjoining room.  With a frown
of impatience Selwyn was about to demand the reason for his inclusion
in the silly affair, when the other stopped him with a gesture and
closed the door.

'Quick!' he said.  'Grab that knife--here's the _Sketch_.  Look through
it for anything about Dick Durwent.'

Seeing that the other was serious, Selwyn spread the paper before him
and hurriedly searched its columns.

'Great Scott!' he cried.  'Here it'----

'Sh-sh!  Hurry up and cut it out.  Right.  I'll fix up the _Mirror_ in
the same way.  Now skim through the _Mail_.  Got it?  By Jove! damn
near a whole column.  Here'--Maynard ran the knife down the side of the
column.  'Now then, old Fensome has promised to get the thing out of
the _Post_, and to tell Lord Durwent before he goes to town.  But he
mustn't hear of it this way, and those women are not to know a word
about it while they're in the house.'

Selwyn nodded and looked at the ragged clippings in his hand:


  'ATTEMPTED MURDER IN WEST END.'
  'WELL-KNOWN NOBLEMAN ATTACKED BY PEER'S SON.'
  'QUARREL OVER DEMI-MONDAINE.'


'Gad, those are juicy lines, aren't they?' said Maynard.  'Won't some
of our worthy citizens lick their chops over them, and point to the
depravity of the upper classes?  Do you know Dick Durwent?'

'I have seen him a couple of times.'

'Awfully decent chap.  Screw loose, you know, and punishes his Scotch
no end, but a topping fellow underneath.  I don't know who the bit of
fluff is that they're fighting about, but you can wager a quid to a bob
that Dick thought he was doing her a good turn.'

'I wonder who the nobleman is.'

'Can't say, I'm sure.  Probably he can't either just now, seeing what
Durwent did to him.  Of course, it's a rotten thing to say, but if the
blighter's really going to die, I hope he's one of the seventeen who
stand between me and the Earldom of Forth.'

There was a knock at the door, and an inquiry regarding the newly
discovered author.

'Coming,' called Maynard, reaching for the _Daily Mail_.  'Shove those
clippings in your pocket, Selwyn, and for the love of Allah help me to
select something here that I can pretend to have written.  Fortunately
I can play the blithering idiot without much trouble.'




CHAPTER XI.

THE RENDING OF THE VEIL.


I.

The house-party at Roselawn had hurriedly broken up, and only Selwyn
remained.  In view of the scandal about Dick Durwent, although it was not
spoken of by any one, he felt that it would have been more delicate to
leave with the other guests.  But it seemed as if the Durwents dreaded to
be alone.  His presence gave an impersonal shield behind which they could
seek shelter from each other, and they urged him so earnestly to remain
that it would have been ungracious to refuse.

It was the evening of August 4th, and the family circle, reduced to four,
had just finished dinner.  There had been only one topic of
conversation--there could be but one.  Britain had given Germany until
midnight (Central European time) to guarantee withdrawal from Belgium.

After dinner the family adjourned for coffee to the living-room, and, as
was his custom, Lord Durwent proffered his guest a cigar.

'No, thanks,' said Selwyn.  'If you will excuse me, I think I will do
without a smoke just now.--Lady Durwent, do you mind if I go to my room
for half-an-hour?  There are one or two matters I must attend to.'

Half-way up the stairs he changed his mind, and went out on the lawn
instead.  Darkness was setting in with swiftly gathering shadows, and he
found the cool evening air a slight solace to a brow that was weary with
conflicting thoughts.

America had not acted.  There towards the west his great country lay
wrapped in ocean's aloofness.  The pointed doubts of the ex-army captain
had been confirmed--America had stood aside.  Well, why shouldn't she!
It was all very well, he argued, for Britain to pose as a protector of
Belgium, but she could not afford to do otherwise.  It was simply
European politics all over again, and the very existence of America
depended on her complete isolation from the Old World.

Yet Germany had sworn to observe Belgium's neutrality, and at that very
moment her guns were battering the little nation to bits.  Was that just
a European affair, or did it amount to a world issue?

If only Roosevelt were in power! . . .  Who was this man Wilson, anyway?
Could anything good come out of Princeton? . . .  In spite of himself,
Selwyn laughed to find how much of the Harvard tradition remained.

If America had only spoken.  If she had at least recorded her protest.
Supposing Germany won. . . .

Supposing----

He kicked at a twig that lay in his path, and recalled the wonderful
regiments that he had seen march past the Kaiser only three months ago.
Who was going to stop that mighty empire?  Effeminate France?  Insular,
ease-loving England?

Passing the stables, he started nervously at hearing his name spoken.

'Good-evening, Mr. Selwyn.  It's pleasant out o' doors, sir.'

It was Mathews, the head-groom of the Durwents.

'Yes,' said the American, pausing, 'very pleasant.'

'It looks sort of as if we was going to 'ave some ditherin's wi' Germany,
Mr. Selwyn.'

'It does.  I don't see how war can be averted now.'

'It's funny Mister Malcolm ain't 'ome yet, sir.  Has 'is moberlizin'
orders came?'

'There's a War Office telegram in the house.  I suppose his instructions
are in it.'

The groom shook his head and swung philosophically on his heels.  He was
a broad-faced man of nearly fifty, with an honest simplicity of
countenance and manner engendered of long service where master and man
live in a relation of mutual confidence.  He sucked meditatively at a
corn-cob pipe, and Selwyn, changing his mind about a cigar, produced a
case from his pocket.

'Have one, Mathews?' he asked.

'No, thank 'ee, sir.  I'm a man o' easy-goin' 'abits, and likes me old
pipe and me old woman likewise, both being sim'lar and the same.'

With which profound thought he drew a long breath of smoke and sent it on
the air, to follow his philosophy to whatever place words go to.

'If Germany and us puts on the gloves,' ruminated Mathews, 'I'll be real
sor

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