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Helena Brett's Career

by Desmond Coke · English · Gutenberg #33103 · 359,284 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Helena Brett's Career

Author: Desmond Coke


        
Release date: July 7, 2010 [eBook #33103]
                Most recently updated: January 6, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33103

Credits: Produced by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HELENA BRETT'S CAREER ***




Produced by Al Haines










HELENA BRETT'S CAREER


BY

DESMOND COKE

AUTHOR OF THE BOOKS ON THE PAGE OPPOSITE

[Transcriber's note: this list has been moved to the end of this etext]




NEW YORK

E. P. DUTTON & CO.

3, WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET

1913




TO

ARTHUR WAUGH,

CRITIC, PUBLISHER, AND FRIEND,

WHO STARTED ME AS NOVELIST

AND HAS NEVER FAILED SINCE

WITH ENCOURAGEMENT,

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK

IN GRATITUDE.




PREFATORY POSTSCRIPT

In these thin-skinned days when the words libel and traitor drift on
every breeze, it may be "wise" (I am told at the last), to make it
plain that my Author, Publisher, and Artist do not represent real
people!  So be it, then: the men, as also women, in this unromantic
comedy of married life are all imagined; but in declaring them not to
be individuals, I would not be thought to admit that they are
non-existent ... or universal.  Such men have been and will
be--self-centred authors, unscrupulous publishers, vulgar-minded
artists--nor does a paragon make the best food for fiction: but there
are also Others.  Logic still permits one to avoid Libel without
confessing Treachery, and I am little likely to "attack" my own
profession or two others from which I draw some of my nearest friends.
We are told that there are black sheep in every fold; but it is still
possible that a few among the others may be white.  It pleases some of
us to think so.

DESMOND COKE




CONTENTS


PART I

HOW IT HAPPENED

CHAPTER

     I.  ADVICE
    II.  "WHY MEN MARRY"
   III.  "WHY WOMEN WED"
    IV.  HYMEN


PART II

HUBERT BRETT'S WIFE

     V.  ROUTINE
    VI.  GROWTH
   VII.  THE CULT OF USELESSNESS
  VIII.  A SCENE IN THE HOME
    IX.  CINDERELLA
     X.  HONOUR
    XI.  PINK PAPERS AND ST. ANTHONY
   XII.  DEVILS
  XIII.  SECRETS
   XIV.  WAS IT WORTH WHILE?
    XV.  DISCOVERIES
   XVI.  A MATTER OF SALES
  XVII.  THE TEMPTER


PART III

HELENA BRETT'S CAREER

  XVIII.  ZOË
    XIX.  BUSINESS
     XX.  PLEASURE
    XXI.  EXPOSURE
   XXII.  THE IRON IN THE SOUL
  XXIII.  SECRET NUMBER TWO
   XXIV.  BATTLE ROYAL
    XXV.  THE BROKEN TRIANGLE
   XXVI.  TACT
  XXVII.  THE TWO WAYS
 XXVIII.  WOMAN PROPOSES
   XXIX.  HELENA BRETT'S CAREER




PART I

HOW IT HAPPENED


HELENA BRETT'S CAREER


CHAPTER I

ADVICE

"Of course," said Kenneth Boyd, with the abrupt conviction of one whose
argument is off the point at issue, "it's absolutely obvious.  You
ought to marry."

The man who ought to marry was no more pleased to hear it than most of
his kind.  He scowled angrily: then smiled, as though contempt were a
more fit reply.  He was tall, broad, firm-looking, with smooth dark
hair still low upon his forehead, and certainly looked in no need of
drastic remedies.

He knocked his pipe out on the grate before he answered, but when the
words came, they burst forth like an explosion.

"You married men," he cried, turning the attack, "are just like
parrots.  You can only say one thing.  You're worse than parrots:
you're gramophones--or parrots with a gramophone inside.  You're always
saying one thing, 'Marry!' and you say it jolly long.  I honestly
believe you've got a Trades Union, unless it's merely nasty feeling!
That probably is it.  You hate to see others as happy as you used to
be!"

Whereat, comforted, he stretched his long legs and lay back on the deep
chair in a better humour.

"No," said the other gently.  "We hate to see them miserable and know
they'll never realise man's one chance of happiness till it's too late."

He spoke in very earnest tones and looked almost anxiously across at
his friend, now quite happy again with the flushed sensation of having
achieved something at any rate not too far from an epigram.  A peaceful
smile played round the big mouth which alone betrayed weakness in his
pale, clear-cut face.

How young he was in some ways, Kenneth Boyd reflected--in
self-complacency, for one!  And yet, in others, how much too settled
and fixed for his years.  Here he was, a ten-year resident of these
rooms--comfortable enough, yes--looked after by a sister; turning out
his yearly novel, no worse but no better than the one before; an old
bachelor at thirty-five, and yet too young to speak of marriage as
anything except a rather tasteless joke!

He watched him anxiously, as he might watch his patients at the
hospital, and wondered whether he was beyond helping.

Hubert Brett said nothing.  He was angry.

Why, he was wondering, had he telephoned for Boyd to come along at all?
He always _had_ asked Boyd, of course, even in the dear old Oxford
days, when he was in a difficulty.  Boyd's great forehead, thick chin,
and deep voice gave him a sort of solid, comfortable air: and he was
never sympathetic....  Probably his medical work--it was not nice,
quite, to think of it like that--made him a restful person to consult?
He always smoothed you down and made you feel that what you meant to do
would be entirely for the best.

But he had been off form to-night....

Marry, indeed!  Why, that had nothing to do with the case at all.  It
was Ruth's maddening stupidity that had made him ask Kenneth in.  These
rows with one's sister were horrible--and bad for work....  Besides,
they used to be such pals as kids: it wasn't nice, now, to be
quarrelling like any costermonger and his wife.  Yet each absurd
quarrel was followed by one more absurd.

What had it been all about to-night?  He had forgotten that already.
The actual row was a surprise.  Ruth had started this one.  He had not
seen it coming, even, till they were both on their feet.

She was so maddening, you see!

He didn't mind an egoist.  He sometimes thought, in moments of
depression, he was one himself (but he did not believe in
introspection).  It was an egoist who claimed to be a martyr that
aroused his anger.

Ruth was always claiming to have sacrificed herself.  _She_ didn't
matter.  No one must consider her.  She hadn't married.  She gave her
life up willingly to her dear brother.  If he trod on her sometimes,
she only liked to feel that he was free to wing his way to fame.  And
all that sort of stuff ... when all the while, she never did a single
thing he wanted, but in the most selfish way made everything as hard as
it could be for his work, when she herself was doing nothing!  What a
fuss if he was half an hour or so late for their lonely meal!  How
could it matter?  He was in the middle of a paragraph, sometimes: and
what did she do after dinner, anyhow?  Nothing but play Patience, while
he went back to work!  How could it make any difference at what hour
she dined?...

Probably to-night had been some trifle of that sort: he had forgotten,
really; but at the end of it she had stood up and said, for the first
time: "Well, I can always be turned out.  There's no real reason why we
should live together."

"The first sensible remark you've made," he had replied, made
elementary by anger, and gone out to telephone to Boyd.

Why, after all, _did_ they live together?  Would he be happier without
her?  Or would a cook-housekeeper be worse?  How did other men get on?
Most of them, somehow, seemed to marry....  Boyd would know, though--he
went to so many homes.  But Boyd might say that it was not quite fair
on Ruth....  That was nonsense, though.  Brothers weren't ever meant or
bound to keep their sisters, and thirty-eight was not too old for women
to get married.  It was the fashionable age.  Nobody now cared for
girls.  Only Ruth never wanted to go out, or, if she did, it was to
some quite silly show where he could not be seen....  Well, he would
see what Boyd said.  That was the best way.

And Boyd, having listened to the passionate recital in an owlish
silence, had answered: "It's quite obvious.  You ought to marry!" Just
what those idiots of doctors always said.  Marriage and golf were their
only two ideas, even for any one with liver.

"_Why_ ought I to marry?" he blazed out suddenly, to the surprise of
his friend, who could not follow his thought during the long pause.

"Why, my dear fellow?  Because you're stagnating--because it is life's
second stage--because you've got beyond the first--because each of your
books is exactly like the last----"

This ceased to be theory.  Hubert was in arms at once.

"I don't see that," he said in a hard voice, almost sulkily.  "As a
matter of fact, several of the critics went out of their way to call
_The Bread of Idleness_ new, original, etcetera."

"Yes," replied Kenneth Boyd, who secretly enjoyed wounding just deeply
enough his friend's self-esteem; "the plot was different, but its
heroine the same.  You had her in _Wandering Stars_; you had her in
_Life_; you've had her in them all.  There is a Hubert Brett type no
less than a Gibson Girl."

"I still don't see, even so," Hubert icily replied, "exactly why I have
to marry."

Kenneth Boyd smiled unseen.  "Because to widen your art, you must widen
your idea of woman.  If you really know one woman, they say, then you
can know them all."

A good deal of the author's self-esteem returned.  He looked relieved.
So that was all, was it?

"If you know them all, as I do, by study," he answered, "you don't
_want_ to know one."

And now indeed Kenneth Boyd peered at him seriously, as at a patient
very critical.

"That sort of remark," he said, "just shows that you know nothing about
women and ought to marry one."

Hubert laughed.  "Dear old Kenneth!" and there was pity in his voice.
"Perhaps I should, if I knew nothing of them really.  But I'm afraid I
know too much."

His counsellor made no reply.  He always knew when he had failed.  He
also knew, from long experience, the only weapon that availed when once
the hard line came round Brett's weak lips.  He waited prudently, while
they both smoked, and then he grasped it firmly.

"Well, it's a pity, Hubert," he said gaily, as though he had abandoned
his attempt and could afford by now to laugh at it, "because you'd not
only solve the sister problem but--look at the advertisement!  'Famous
Author Weds.'  'Mr. Hubert Brett, the Novelist, who is to be married
this week.  Photo by Bassano.'  'Mr. Brett's beautiful young wife.'
'Mrs. Brett, wife of the celebrated author, opens a bazaar.'"

"Oh, shut up," cried Hubert quite youthfully, and made some pretence at
throwing a tobacco-pouch, but did not seem displeased.

"Then," went on the remorseless friend, "she is at parties every day,
and universally admired.  Who is she? everybody naturally asks.  Why,
the wife of Hubert Brett.  Have you read his new novel?  If not, do."

"You must think me a conceited fool," Hubert put in, "if you imagine I
swallow all that."  Sometimes he suspected Boyd of sneering.  Mrs.
Boyd, he knew, disliked him.  She had often tried a snub.  She was a
very brainless woman....

Kenneth Boyd dropped his manner of burlesque.

"All the same," he said, falling back into the old vein, "a wife _does_
a lot in one's career, you know.  She has so much more time for making
friends.  I always look on mine as my best canvasser!  Why, man" (and
now he shamelessly threw off the mask), "you simply don't know what
you're missing.  When I look back on my old single days, I hardly can
believe that it was me or how I could have been such an almighty ass as
to have wasted all those ghastly years.  Perhaps, though, I shouldn't
enjoy our life now so much, if I'd not had a good mouthful of the
other.  Good lord--the discomfort; the loneliness; the want of any one
who really cares; the feeling that there's nothing _permanent_; the
frantic writing round to make sure you won't have a lonely evening; the
sick despair when some one fails and you sit moping by your fire or
wander out among a crowd of laughing couples, damnably alone; the lack
of any purpose in life; the constant cadging round for somebody to save
you from a Soho restaurant.  Good lord, it simply can't be true I had
five years of it, and now...!  Of course, Hubert, I know what you'll
say.  We're all different; you're not that sort; you never feel all
this; you wouldn't feel as I do, if you married.  But you do--you
would.  We're all utterly the same, deep down.  You novelists forge
little differences to help out your stories, but I tell you, deep down,
men are all the same.  We all get lonely, we all get sad and hopeless
as the years go on, we want just _one_ who values us more than the
rest, who cares for our success, who smoothes away our failures.  We
can't, any one of us, get on alone.  You're only shy, that's all.  You
funk proposing--you'd feel such a fool!  But what's all that?  There
must be lots of jolly girls about.  Just you fix on one, get married,
and then come and settle down near us, out Hampstead way.  Think of it!
No climbing back into a grimy lodging--sorry, old man, but I mean the
fogs.  If you could just see Hampstead in a winter sunset!  Then a nice
little home, all new and clean; tea all put ready for you by your wife;
the kiddies keen to see you; that's the one way, I tell you, for _all_
men to come home.  We're not different, a bit.  We all want--_you_
want--love and comradeship; we want another thing beside ourselves, in
whose success we can feel proud; we want our wife, our children, and we
want our home.  And that's exactly what you want, my boy!"

Carried along midway, he suddenly became self-conscious and collapsed
with the last sentence.

Hubert ironically clapped his hands.  "Splendid, splendid!  You ought
to write advertisements; I'm sure the Garden City would pay a big
premium.  Title, 'The New Home!'"

He was much too absorbed to notice the hurt look that came over the
other's face.  Kenneth Boyd had been expensively educated, as a boy, in
all English ideals.  He never had dared, until just now, to show his
Self to any one except his wife.  Now, when it was mocked at, he felt a
hideous shame, a terrible resentment.  And he had only wished to help
his friend!

Hubert contentedly passed on to the analysis of his own state, a plea
for his own attitude.  "I am different, though," he said, "all the
same.  You can't understand.  My job, for one thing, is so different.
I must be left alone to do it.  I _don't_ 'come home,' as you so
poetically put it; I'm there all the time.  So would your 'kiddies' be,
and they'd be a damned bore.  Just when I was dying to get on with my
new book, they'd be what you call 'keen to see me' and squall if I
wouldn't.  Oh, I can see it all.  I've too much imagination, far, to
need to marry; I've been through it all a thousand times, without.  I
can see my dear wife, as you call her, filthily jealous of my work and
grudging every minute that I took for it.  It's all so different for
you fellows who go off to work.  You've got your hours of solitude all
free for business and then you come back to tea, if you're a slacker,
as you've just described.  But nobody ever believes that novelists do
any work; it's just their hobby in spare moments!  Any one may
interrupt and there is no harm done.  My dear wife would buzz in and
out and ask me what I liked for lunch....  Oh, yes, I can see it all."

"You've no idea of it at all," said Kenneth Boyd almost passionately in
his deep, sincere-sounding voice.

"And as to loneliness," Hubert went on, utterly ignoring him, "I see
too many people as it is.  I'm always booked.  I absolutely curse them
sometimes when I feel I haven't seen them for a century and they'll be
getting huffy.  Constant companion and all that stuff, indeed?  No,
thanks!  Shall I tell you _my_ idea of bliss?"

"This, I suppose?" the other asked, waving his pipe-stem pitilessly
around the untidy room, where school football-groups mingled with
Burne-Jones survivals from the Oxford age; where books usurped chairs,
sofa, floor, piano-top; where no intrusive female hand was suffered,
clearly, with methodic duster.

"No," answered Hubert, "though I'm fond of it.  It's good enough for me
as home.  No, my idea of bliss is just an afternoon when I've no teas,
appointments, duties, anything; when I am really free.  Then I put on
my very oldest suit and get out right along the river, Richmond
way--Kew, Putney, anywhere--and stretch my lungs and look at the old
book-shops and enjoy the river.  That's when _I_'m happy, you see!  I
look at the river, out by Richmond Bridge, broad and festive and the
sun upon it; everything all full of life; and I feel free, and that's
the time I take a deep breath in--or by the sea, of course--and say,
'Thank God that I'm alive!'"

"And thank God you're alone?" his friend enquired.  He looked across at
him, no longer by now as at a patient, but as he might have at a
curious specimen inside a labelled bottle.

Hubert was quite pleased to have this opportunity for self-analysis
thrust on him.  He liked to be thought peculiar but wished to be
sincere.  He reflected a little, then slowly blew out a funnel of smoke
with energy behind it.

"Yes," he said, "and thank God I'm alone."




CHAPTER II

"WHY MEN MARRY"

Hubert shut the door after his visitor with no deep feeling of regret.
He managed to refrain from slamming it.

He was angry still.

Men are peculiar about their troubles.  Woman, popularly thought to be
a sieve with secrets, will crush a worry down, grapple silently and
fight with it, nor ever let her very nearest know that it is there.
Perhaps heroic centuries of motherhood have taught her to endure her
own pain with a smile, where she can scarce bear to conceal another's
folly?  The man, in any case, is different.  Tell him what Mrs. Tomkins
stupidly said about the vicar: he will not breathe it to a living soul.
Quite possibly he will not even listen to the end....  But let him have
some small upset, some crisis where decision must be made, not a big
choice--nothing like those he makes off-hand each day up in his city
office--and you shall see him stripped of his pretence to all reserve
or strength.  Long time, like Homeric heroes, he sits tossing thought
hither and thither.  Nothing emerges from this exercise: it is a mere
convention.  He must think a little: people always do; but he knows
well enough that not this way lies decision.  He takes other steps.  If
he is a man of few friends, he will risk everything upon a coin's fall.
"Heads I do, and tails I don't," he mutters weakly, groping in his
pocket.  Up spins the penny.  Heads it is!  "Heads I do," he murmurs
once again; and adds, pathetically firm, "But all the same, I don't
think I will."  He has been helped to his decision.

If he has friends, he will use one of them in place of the penny.
Every man, almost, has one trusted friend whose advice he does not take
in all moments of perplexity.

Kenneth Boyd stood, so to speak, as Hubert's penny.  He always sat and
listened stolidly to his friend's trouble: then he answered "Heads" or
"Tails," as it seemed best to him; went back, braced by the contrast,
to his Hampstead home; and left Hubert to decide whether or no he would
take the spin as final.

In this case, as he sat down, Hubert said to himself with vehemence,
poking the fire fiercely, that he would not.  He had asked Kenneth
whether it would be mean to turn Ruth out, as she herself
suggested--and he had at once embarked on a long rigmarole about dear
wives, winter sunsets, kiddies, teapots, and all sorts of things....

With a last jab at the fire he dismissed the interview just over from
his mind and settled down to think.  He never ought to have asked that
monomaniac along.  He might have guessed what he would say.

Ruth was a nuisance, frankly; she jarred upon him constantly: their
life was one long quarrel nowadays; but--how would solitude affect his
work?

That was the big question.

To Hubert Brett his work was life, and nothing much else counted.  He
was a man who valued success less for its achievement than for its
reward.  He liked to be pointed out as one who wrote (he often was, in
little country places); he enjoyed meeting men and women whose names
were famous far and wide; he loved press-cuttings, revelled in his
photograph when reproduced, and was almost physically upset when he
received a real old-fashioned, slashing review.  To anything of this
sort he always replied, quoting the opinions of some other papers, and
"relying on the editor's sense of justice to give his letter
publicity."  Papers, in fact, that liked neither his novels nor his
letters, had ceased to notice the first-named, hoping to avoid the
last: and he was glad of this decision.  Letters from unknown readers
were shown to all his friends, who also had the privilege of reading
the longest reviews, left out upon his mantel-piece; though when they
took them up he would always protest, "Oh, that'll bore you: it's only
a few stray press-cuttings."  He liked at dinner-parties to sit next
women who had read his books (the dear, kind, tactful sex!), and asked
him how he wrote.  He had, in fact, published his first book under a
pseudonym (his father, as a clergyman, naturally objecting to the real
name being used), but found that no one recognised him as the author
under his own different name.  He therefore, on his father's death, had
paid some pounds and taken the name Brett permanently as his own for
ordinary use.  His sister, who was like most women in being petulant as
to trifles but mild about the things that matter, had submitted from
being Ruth Brettesley to become mere Ruth Brett.  Now, when he dined
out, Hubert often found that women next him would ask if he was "the
author."  It never had occurred to him, of course, that they were
coached by an ideal hostess.

It may be well imagined, then, that he now hesitated before taking any
step that might affect his very methodical arrangements about writing.
His sister, once thrown over (he told himself), would never return.
She would marry or something.  Women were like cats: they always did.
She would not stray about uncomfortably until he wanted her again.  No;
she would make a home: and he, as the years went on, would find himself
alone....

He had lit a pipe, and drew at it mechanically, but he was far too rapt
to taste it.  Kenneth Boyd's words on that one point had certainly gone
home.  His eyes fixed on a glowing cavern of red embers, he saw unroll
before him a grisly panorama of the days to be.

He could see himself, bereft of Ruth's care, moving to a bachelor flat
where they "did for" one; happy enough perhaps, at first, in solitude,
and working well--happy and working until illness came.  Then he saw
the change.  Ruth, he admitted, had been quite splendid--like her old
self--when he had been ill.  That was when you wanted a woman about....
Then, as Kenneth had said, he would grow older.  He could see himself
climbing, more and more shakily each year, the long flight to his flat;
too settled far by now to move even to a lower floor.  He could see the
porters and people saluting--oh, so respectfully!--till he was past,
and then imitating his old, broken shuffle.  He could see himself
turning on with fumbling hands the light he used to switch on so gaily
as he dashed in thirty years ago.  He could see himself all alone at
night, when it was too cold for an old man to walk about and no one
wanted him; sitting there with weary eyes tight closed, thinking of the
friends that he would like to see, the friends all dead or--married....
And finally he could see himself climb those stairs, so full of
memories, for the last time, and stagger in for the last time to that
small room where he had had such jolly parties in the years gone by,
and ring and have just strength to gasp out, "I must have a doctor."
Yes, and that old wreck lying there, alone but for a nurse he hated,
longing for sympathy, love--even Ruth's!--yes, that too would be him.
And then----

For one moment the knock on his door startled him.  He was like a small
child who, waked suddenly, continues a bad dream.  He thought that they
had come with that cheap, humble coffin which he had just seen borne up
the long stairs....  He very nearly cried out, "Bring it in," not
realising that he was the corpse.

"Why, it's you, Ruth!" he cried in vague annoyance.

"Of course it is," she laughed.  "Who else would it be, you stupid boy?
Perhaps you mean, though, you don't want me?"

"Of course I always want you, old girl."  This hideous geniality, he
felt, was the worst part of their whole constant warfare, recalling by
an empty mockery that they had once been such devoted chums; still
could be, possibly, if they were only parted.  "I'm not working," he
added almost grudgingly, as though he wished he had got that excuse.

But Ruth, indecision personified, still hovered restlessly in
mid-carpet.  "Are you quite sure you're not, Hugh?" she said.  "If you
_are_, do say so.  I've been alone all the evening till now, so it
won't hurt me to go on like that till bedtime.  I am used to it, you
see!" and she smiled patiently.

Hubert looked at her, wondering why she possessed this curious gift of
annoying him.  Did she try, or was she really meaning to be kind?  Her
face, set and hard already, gave no hint.  She smiled with her lips but
her eyes did not light up.  There was something tragic in her looks.
She was not ugly, yet she meant absolutely nothing.  She was just a
passable statue, into which the artist had failed somehow to put any
life.  She smiled doggedly with her lips, and she clearly was not
happy.  She had never lived.

She went on wanly smiling reassurance at him, as one who should say, "I
am not to be considered," till he schooled his voice to answer.
Whatever happened, he would not have another scene on this night which
seemed in some way big with a decision.

"It'll be nice to have a little chat, old girl," he said genially.
"Sit down and make yourself comfy."

She moved timidly towards an armchair with the mien of a scolded,
nervous child.  "If you're quite, quite sure?" she quavered.  "I wish I
felt certain you hadn't been just thinking you would settle down, now
Mr. Boyd had gone.  I should be absolutely happy with my Patience."

"Boyd was in great form," Hubert answered.  He could not trust himself
to assure her further.

"What did he say then?" and she let herself down into the chair
staidly.  She was not like a woman of thirty-eight.  Women of
thirty-eight nowadays are young, almost unfashionably young, and Ruth
was pathetically old.  She had given her youth to her mother: she was
prepared to lavish the rest of life upon her brother, asking in return
nothing except that he would not be what she tearfully and often called
unkind to her.

"Say?" answered Hubert, far more comfortably.  "What didn't he say?  My
dear Ruth, I've had a classic homily on Marriage!"

Ruth stiffened visibly.  "Marriage?  Then I suppose you asked him in to
give you his advice?"

"Really," said Hubert in another voice, "I imagine you can't object,
now, to what I ask my pals in for?--supposing that I did."

She smoothed all that kind of thing away with a restful gesture.

"My dear boy, you know I've no objection, as you call it, to anything
at all you do.  You are a man.  I'm only your guest.  I've no right to
object.  But I am naturally interested.  Of course, though, if you'd
rather not tell me what Mr. Boyd said"--she paused, "we'll talk of
something else."

"No we won't," cried Hubert, with a sudden passion.  "I'm sick to death
of all this constant friction."

"Friction!" and she raised her eyebrows ever so slightly.  Otherwise
her sad face remained expressionless, but her hands clasped each other
tensely under an old-fashioned shawl.

"Yes, friction.  That's the only word.  You know, Ruth, I don't want to
be a brute.  You know what pals we were as kids, what pals we still
are" (he forced the words out), "and that's why I intend to have it
out.  It isn't good enough.  You know what a row we had over dinner.
_That's_ why I asked Boyd along.  How do you expect a man to write when
he's just had a row that's brought his soul red-hot into his throat?
And you weren't very cheery company!  So naturally I asked Boyd in.  I
often do that or go out myself or else pretend to work, because I
simply can't endure your company a moment longer."

And now his sister leapt up to her feet.  When she came to life it was
always sudden.

"Hubert!" she cried in tearful reproach.  She only called him Hubert at
such moments.

He signalled her down without any ceremony.

"For goodness' sake," he said, and it was nearly stronger, "don't let's
have a row."  He took a moment to calm himself and then said levelly,
"Look here, old girl, I want to thrash this matter out once and for
all.  It's no use killing love in this world, is it?  It's rare enough,
God knows.  We've been such good pals, you and I, and now we are--like
this."  He pointed at her, and she fell back dully on her chair.

"We don't mean it really," she said, fumbling for her handkerchief.

Hubert spoke seriously.  "We do, though.  Anyhow, we should in time.
It's just like other habits.  It grows.  It grows quickly, too.  We
never used to fight at all, you know."

"_I_ never fight now," she protested, very near to tears.  "I've always
given in."

Poor, timid, self-sacrificing Ruth never could understand what her
brother's tempers were about.  She tried so hard not to stand up
against him!

"Oh, damn!" cried Hubert, and strode madly up and down the room.

It was all very futile, quite familiar.

She looked as pained as usual.  "What is it, Hugh?" she gently asked.

"Of course you've given in," he flung at her.  "You always do.  You're
always in the right: you are so keen to be!  You wouldn't make me cross
for worlds!  It's just your damned humility I can't endure.  No man on
earth could possibly endure it."

"I can't help my nature," she sobbed into her handkerchief.  "I do my
best to please you.  I try to fall into your ways, I'm sure."

Hubert came up to her presently and touched her on the shoulder.

"I'm sorry, Ruth," he said.  "It was my fault.  I lost my temper.  I
was a cad to swear but somehow--oh, I don't know," and he sank down
upon the chair again.  "I suppose really it's just what Boyd has often
said, brother and sister weren't ever made to live together.  He says
all relatives have a natural antipathy to one another and----"

"I'm sure _I_ haven't," interrupted Ruth.

This time he ignored her.  "It's all so difficult," he said in a new
tone, as though embarking upon an analysis.  "I know you're wanting
just to please me, Ruth; you are an awfully good sort; you'll make
somebody a splendid wife some day; but just because you are my sister,
I suppose, I get annoyed when you begin asking whether you can come in
and saying you don't want to if----"

"You'd be much more annoyed if I came in without," said Ruth, with an
unwonted spirit.

Hubert rose to the attack.  "You mean it's just my nature, and not you?
I'd get annoyed whichever way it was?  I'm just a selfish sort of
cross-grained swine?"

"I didn't say so, you _know_ I didn't; you're simply twisting my words
round."

Grown men and women, by some odd irony, are never nearer childhood than
when in a temper.  Hubert realised abruptly how ridiculous it was.
Once more he dropped his voice and dragged the conversation with a
wrench back to the point at issue.

"I was only telling you," he said with dignity, "what Boyd said, as you
asked to know.  He said all this"--once more he waved his hand--"was a
mistake, and that I ought to marry."

He threw it out at her like a threat at a naughty child.  She would not
like it if he took her at her word and really turned her out.

But even sisters can surprise a man.  "Oh Hugh," she cried, forgetting
all their differences, "do you mean you are really thinking----?  Only,
do let it be some one really nice, who'll make you as happy as you
deserve to be."

He was too flustered to feel touched.  "But wouldn't you mind?" he
asked; and in spite of his efforts, surprise appeared in it.

"Mind?"  She came across to him, sat on his chair-arm, and took his
hand in hers.  "How little you know me, old boy, really!  Of course I
shouldn't mind.  You must never, never consider me at all!  Do you
imagine I expect you to remain a bachelor your whole life long, just to
look after me?  I shall find work to do or something; and anyhow, what
is my life by the side of your career?"

Hubert at moments felt a brute, and this was one of them.  He knew that
he should thank her, kiss her, yet he could do neither.  He found
himself wondering in a dazed, abstract way, as often in these past
years, whether she was really genuine or whether it was just a woman's
bluff to make him feel his shaft had fallen short.  If she was quite
sincere, he felt almost aggrieved.  The end of their long life together
seemed to mean so little to her....

"No," he said automatically, not realising how inadequate it was; and
then, "Well, old girl, I really think perhaps _now_ I ought to work."
He patted her hand in a perfunctory way as he released his own from it.
"We've had our little chat and it's your bedtime, I am sure."

"Yes," answered Ruth, and hesitated.

"Hugh," she said presently, "aren't I to know who it is?"  Her tone was
more patient than aggrieved, but he read something of the other into it.

"Who what is?" he replied, although he guessed her meaning.

"Who you think of marrying.  Who's suddenly put the idea into your
head."  She waited a few moments; then, as he said nothing, she added
almost slyly, "Well, I think I know!  I've not forgotten Devonshire
yet, and what a lot there was in your letters about Miss--Miss--I
forget her name."

"Oh, that Miss Hallam, you mean," came the icy answer.

It chilled even her exuberance.  Her rare gaiety died quickly, and she
looked the martyr once again.

"I see you don't mean to tell me," she said.  "Very well.  Of course I
had no right to ask.  I thought you'd like to let me know."  She
sighed.  "I wish men weren't so terribly reserved."

"And I wish," he retorted, "that women weren't so horribly imaginative."

But she had shut the door.  She always went abruptly, never said good
night.  He had told her, long ago, that those words broke up his
evening and made him think of bed instead of work.

To-night indeed, after her going, although he had said he must do some
writing, he sat quietly where he had been and gazed into the fire.  He
was not, however, thinking about bed.  He was wondering whether all
women were so crude and vulgar with their brothers.  Ruth was the last
person who would ever have said that about Miss Hallam to anybody else.
Just because he chanced to write and say that he had met a jolly sort
of girl...!

It is a stale truism about good advice, that most natures must reject
it before they see their way to its acceptance.  Self-pride demands
that it shall be their own idea.

Just as Hubert had scoffed at his friend's idea of loneliness, which
now indeed seemed such a ghastly spectre, so did he next work slowly
back to the very words of his sister that had angered him the most.

For by now his mental questioning had spread across a chasm dreaded for
long years and flaunted itself gaily in a narrow field.

The first step was so clear by now.

Of course he had sworn always that he would not marry, but that was
true of the past only.  One changed every now and then....  He was at
the age when one grew lonely, when one naturally married.  Sisters were
a big mistake.  He could not endure year after year of silly quarrels
like the one just past.  With a wife he would start fresh.  She
wouldn't irritate him like Ruth: he wouldn't see through all her
motives; they need not fight for years....  Besides, he must find some
one less irritating, less selfish, than Ruth....  And as to Ruth, she
said herself that she was game to go.  She probably preferred it.  The
whole thing was her own suggestion....  Yes, she was right; they
certainly could not go on like this.  Yet if she went--that loneliness
when he got old, was ill...!  Kenneth had talked a lot of drivel but he
probably was right about stagnation.  He found, himself, his work was
getting stale....  And then the help that she----

But who?

Hubert flung himself across the chasm, refusing doggedly to see it, and
found himself, flushed and excited, in the little field beyond.

Who could he marry, possibly?  The question lent quite a new thrill to
life.  It was a big adventure, even if one never did it....

He hated clever women.  He was sure of that.  Hated them, at any rate,
as wives.  Mrs. Kenneth Boyd was one, and when he dined with them, she
always waited till he had thrown out a theory, quite impromptu,
possibly exaggerated rather, about something, and then said, "Really,
Mr. Brett?  But how unusual!" or something of the sort.  No, he could
not bear that.  He thought that type an insult to his sex.  He liked a
woman to be rather silly--well, not that quite--no, but shallow.  He
liked her to have not too many views herself: he hated suffragettes and
things, of course; but just to have the brains to understand one's own
ideas.  That was where the girl Ruth had mentioned was so splendid.
She saw the fun of things; she even saw the fun of her name, Helena
Hallam; but also she could enter into the plot of a book directly you
had told it her, and be immensely interested in hearing about people
you met at the Authors' Club.  She was almost too ignorant, of
course--knew nothing about life--but her naïve remarks amused him: so
what did it matter?

That really was the sort of woman he would like to marry.  Some one who
would be interested in his work but know she hadn't got the brain to
interfere; some one who'd look on his work-hours as sacred, because
given to a thing she couldn't do to save her very life.

Ruth was annoying about that, and silly.  If he read her out a chapter,
she would usually say, "I think it's quite good, old boy; but I never
feel you're made for fiction.  I suppose essays never sell, though, and
plays are quite impossible?"  It was too stupid.  She had said that
even about _Wandering Stars_, which had sold close upon five thousand
copies!  Not--of course--that he valued his novels according to their
sales....

The girl in Devonshire had been so different.  He smiled, recalling her
simplicity.  She had thought him so clever to write, even before she
had seen a word of it!  And when he read her out a chapter, she wanted
to know just how long it had taken him, asked to see how much he had
corrected, and clearly looked upon the whole thing as a miracle.

Thinking of her now he had a curiously vital image of her personality.
She was so fresh, so natural, so unspoilt, so splendidly a thing of
life.  She had never been to London.  How she would love to see it; how
gorgeous it would be to show!  How different from taking out Ruth, who
always said that the streets smelt of petrol and she had neuralgia and
wished they could live in the country, but of course _he_ must choose!
How different altogether!  How different when the lights were lit and
curtains drawn!  He still remembered how she sat, with one foot
underneath her body, and smiled through those curiously bright eyes, as
though always contentedly awaiting the next jolly thing that life could
not possibly fail to bestow upon her.  Ruth was so hideously gloomy and
apologetic.  She expected the worst but she never minded.

Yes, there was no doubt that was just the sort of sensible, unsloppy,
cheerful girl that he would like to marry.  She would be nice to have
about the house.  She wouldn't want the vote or anything.  She thought
so much of his work that she would never grumble, like Ruth, if he had
a long bout at it.  She'd take up needle-work or something.  She had
such a happy nature.  And then at nights they'd sit and have great,
jolly, sociable talks beside the fire, and he'd read out his books to
her.  Possibly, now and then, she would see some mistake--not in the
book itself, but in a woman's dress or something: women were so good at
details--and he would learn a lot, as Kenneth said, from seeing how her
refreshingly simple mind regarded things.  And then--she was a
child--they would play games and laugh and roast chestnuts and all that
sort of thing.  He could imagine quite a jolly evening.  The past hour
seemed like a nightmare by the side of it.

He got up and mixed a whisky and soda.

Really by now he wished he had thought of all this in Devonshire!  He
had said to himself then, watching her, that somebody someday would be
a lucky man--the girl was so herself, somehow.  But it had not occurred
to him that he could be the man.

Now, probably, he would never see the Hallams again.  Mrs. Hallam, of
course, had said they must meet soon in London, but every one always
said that and it was five weeks now since his return.  He had not,
naturally, ever written.

Of course--there was another thrill in this idea--he could go down to
Devonshire again with any false excuse trumped up; but even as this
came into his head, his fatally quick fancy, over-exercised, saw him
proposing to Miss Hallam, pouring out the sentimental stuff that a
love-scene demanded; perhaps--who knows?--even feeling bound to kneel
in the manner beloved of conventional romance!

Then, with a swift gesture, he suddenly drained his whisky and soda to
its dregs, put the glass down jauntily as men do on the stage, and
walked, feeling younger than for ten whole years, to his writing-desk.
He gave a happy laugh as he took out some paper.

For he had got a great idea.  He was going to propose to Miss Hallam on
paper!  He was going to write it all down and see if it looked awful
rubbish....  He was enjoying himself to-night in a quite new way.

"DEAR MISS HALLAM," he began and added "My" in front.  Then as he saw
the meaning that might bear he laughed again.  He knew it was not right
just now to laugh, and marked it as an interesting fact.  Then, nervous
of detection, he took a new sheet and started--


"MY DEAR MISS HALLAM,

"You will be surprised to hear from me.

"The fact of the matter is--I find myself getting very bald now that I
really have to use my pen for something that matters!--I have been
thinking a lot of my jolly days in Devonshire, the tennis, the
sea-walks, the picnics, everything with all of you, and (if I'm allowed
to say it) especially with _you_ yourself."


Here he leant back and read what he had written.  It was not literature
but he felt satisfied.  He took up his pen again and wrote--


"I don't know that it's usual, but I am rather reserved and not too
romantic, so that I am _writing_ to ask whether you could think of
being my wife.  There has never been any one in my whole life of whom I
have thought as I have thought of you these last five weeks.  I could
never tell you how I feel in words, and I see now that I can't on
paper, but if you think in any way that you could grow fond of me, I am
convinced that we could be immensely happy.  I don't know that I have
much to offer you; but if you talk to your mother about this, as no
doubt you will, you must assure her that I can give you a comfortable
home and that I hope, as the years go by, to make myself something of a
name.

"I will say no more now.  I shouldn't have dared say so much, if I had
not thought that we got on rather well last month, and that if you did
not welcome this letter, you would at any rate be able to forgive it.

"Yours,
  "HUBERT BRETT."


It was not certainly at all like any of the love-letters that he had
written in fiction or read in the police-reports; but he had not
inwardly approved of either.  This seemed to him quite adequate.  She
was the sort of girl who wouldn't care for sentiment.  He honestly
believed she would write back sensibly and just say "Yes."

It is to be remarked that no question remained as to posting the letter
or not, so soon as it was finished.  He had begun it to see how it
looked: now he felt that it was something fated.  He must see what
happened.  Without waiting even to put on a hat, he hurried out to an
adjacent pillar-box and dropped the letter in with hardly more emotion
than if it had been an ordinary bill.

      *      *      *      *      *

Going up to bed, without repentance for the night's wild work, and in
fact oddly calm for any one in his position, he heard a curious noise
inside his sister's room.

He stopped and listened at the door.

She was obviously sobbing.

Hubert suddenly felt softened towards her.  So she cared, after all!
She felt the separation after these long years!

Had he sometimes wronged her?  Had he been impatient?  Was she really
fond of him; trying to consult his wishes and not to irritate him?  Was
he growing selfish?...

He very nearly tapped and went in to console her.  Then he reflected
that she almost certainly would engineer another scene, and that always
gave him a bad night.




CHAPTER III

"WHY WOMEN WED"

Helena had never thought much about marriage.  There was no reason
indeed why she should, for she was young and to her it still appeared,
like death to a small child, as something she was sure to reach some
day but need not worry with just now.

She was, in fact, nineteen, but her ideas were those of nineteen fifty
years ago or of fourteen to-day.  Devonshire, for one thing, has slept
on in its soft air, not much disturbed by any modern turmoil; and for
another, Helena's mother had ideas.  These, briefly put, consisted in
not letting her daughter have any.

It is, however, only human, from Eve downwards, to defy authority and
search for knowledge.  Helena, knowing that it was her lot to marry,
naturally felt some interest in the habit.  Whenever she came on
allusions to it, she stocked them in her brain, all in a healthy and
quite natural way, wondering in an abstract manner whether it would be
thus or thus with her.  She never dared to talk about it to her mother.
She had once mentioned her own hypothetic marriage, only to be told
that girls did not speak of such things in fun, and it would be quite
time enough when the occasion rose, and had she given the canary its
clean water?

Mrs. Hallam was a loving mother with stern theories.  Her own childhood
had been a season of repression, yet she was satisfied enough with her
morals as opposed to those of many round her.  She intended, therefore,
to repeat the process.  She had no patience--this was her favourite
expression--with the licence of young girls to-day: the manner in which
they read any novel, went to any play.  She had no patience with this
rubbish about ignorance not being innocence.  Of course it was; or if
it wasn't, it had very much the same result, and that was everything.
Girls read these trashy novels and got a notion that grown men and
women spent their whole lives falling in and out of love.  They
naturally tried it and began flirtation as a sort of duty.  If a girl
knew nothing, she did not know what to do.  If she had no notion what
flirtation meant, she clearly couldn't do it--especially if she saw no
men till she was safely beyond her teens.

In any case, till she was twenty, Helena had no plays, novels, or
man-friends.  Her reading was all lives, histories, and comic papers.
Her days were spent with relatives or younger friends, when she was not
alone.

She grew up an oddly fine tribute to the system, thus underlining the
depressing axiom which comes at length to all who study education: that
those who are going to be nice will turn out nice, whatever way you
train their youth, and much the same about the nasty.  She was simple,
healthy, buoyant, cheerful, natural; everything that Hubert thought.
And who shall blame her if she was a little immature?

Hubert's letter was a real excitement in her cloistered life.

She had enjoyed her meeting with him.  Men were a novelty, and to her
an author was still that thing of wonder which he appeared to a
suburban hostess twenty years ago.  She thought him marvellously clever
at first sight, and rather alarming.  Later, she thought him easy to
get on with and amusing.  He played tennis well, liked finding crabs,
and Mother did not seem to mind them talking.  It was quite a jolly
change.  She finally thought him a dear and missed him when he left for
Town.

And now--this letter!

Nothing ever could be less expected.  She read it and re-read, not
knowing really what she ought to do.  She was just as excited and
laughed as gaily as he one day before--vaguely infected, no less, with
a thrill of irresponsible adventure.

Now, indeed, was the moment to collect all the vague tit-bits she had
garnered as to marriage and fit them into a connected whole.  She knew
so little, really, of this thing that he suggested, and Mother, she
knew, would not help her.  The comic papers were curious about it.
They looked on all men who married as fools, sure to repent; all women
who didn't as ludicrously tragic.  The old maid was a figure to be as
much mocked and pitied as the old bachelor was to be envied.

Well, if this were so, it must be jolly hard for women to find a man
who would marry!  (Logic teaches that absurd premises will often lead
to sensible conclusions.)

She knew vaguely that one Asked Mamma.  There was a book even called
that in the old locked case in the big library.  She also knew,
however, that she must battle this thing out herself.  Her mother would
say no; what nonsense!  Of that she felt sure.  It was for her, then,
to decide.

Lock up your Danäe, stern mothers, in all the towers that man's wit may
devise; yet if she is born with a strong resolve knit on her pudgy,
slobbered, baby face, you cannot possibly prevail.  You battle with the
forces of uncounted Time.

Mrs. Hallam sat happily in her white drawing-room and read the new
_Queen_, while Helena, up in her bedroom, wrestled with the letter
which her mother luckily had not seen arrive.

Of course it would be a big change, she supposed?  Home was a bit dull,
but she had got quite used to it and one knew what to do.  Having a
house must be an awful business, and yet--rather thrilling!  Probably
Mr. Brett would make a big name; he was so immensely clever; and then
they'd have a great big house, and she'd ask Mother as a guest and give
her all the things she liked and said she never got in her own house!
She laughed at the idea.  The whole thing was tremendously amusing.

As Hubert had thought, she was laudably unsloppy.  Mrs. Hallam had
never let her guess that there was any sentiment in the whole world
beyond maternal love.  That was the heart's whole duty for a girl who
was an only child that had not even seen her father.

Yes, summing it all up, she really felt the chief thing was about women
having to marry or else be a joke, whereas men were a huge lark if they
did.  Imagine if, in all her life, she never met another man who would
be fool enough!  Home was very nice, of course, but horribly
monotonous.  She might read novels now, oh yes; the ones that Mother
chose; but it was just the others that she longed to read.  She felt
vaguely (for self-development is among the instincts natural to Man),
that there was something being _kept_ from her.  She had not been
meant, ever, to remain so ignorant.  She felt that Mr. Brett would not
wish to keep her back in the way Mother had.  Besides, if she remained
at home, some day her mother would die, and she be left--that dreaded
thing--an old maid, all alone, for every one to mock.  Nobody would
want her then!  Wouldn't it be awful to feel you had thrown away a
chance that lots of women, she had gathered, never got?  Fancy being
Helena Hallam, that absurd name, all your life!  H. H., one of her
uncles had called her stupidly, and she had said then that it sounded
like poor Miss Jowett in the village, whom everyone called "old J. J.,"
because her name was Jane.  Oh yes, she would end at last as old H.
H.--poor old H. H.--pottering about in her prim little garden with an
antiquated, rat-like dog dragging itself crookedly along behind her.
All the village poor would be so sorry when she died.

She shuddered at the thought.  She always wanted to put poor J. J.'s
old dog, the one with the pink satin bow, out of its misery.  It would
be kind, she knew.  She could with the air-gun, but Mother had seemed
really shocked.

She suddenly decided at this point that her thoughts had become
depressing and not really helpful towards a decision.  Without giving
herself time to feel alarmed, she rose abruptly and went to the
drawing-room.

She knew instinctively she must be firm.

This was the first thing ever that had really mattered, mattered to
_her_ as a separate person with a life to live, and she believed she
knew already what she ought to do.  She would listen, of course, to
Mother's views--she owed that from a real love and gratitude--but she
would not be bullied any longer.

She entered the room feeling herself in some way on a different
footing.  The latent, undeveloped thing that would be Helena had surged
towards birth at a mere spark from the outer world.

"Mother," she began, quite simply, "I've had a letter from Mr. Brett.
He has asked me to marry him and I think I rather shall."

Mrs. Hallam dropped her _Queen_.  She did not often find herself
surprised.

"You've what, dear?" she asked blankly.  Then not waiting for any
reply, "What do you know about marriage, my dear child?  What do you
know about Mr. Brett?"

"I don't want to be an old maid," answered Helena, playing her best
card at once.

Mrs. Hallam met it with a scornful laugh.  "Old maid!" she cried.
"That is a preposterous idea you've got out of your comic papers."

"They're all I've ever read, histories and them," Helena said mildly;
raising who shall say how many bitter doubts in the breast of a
theorist.

"You're nothing but a child, my darling girl," the mother said more
gently; "and even if you weren't, there's no disgrace in being what you
call an old maid.  Some of the world's best women have been that.
You've got to think of far more serious matters than that before you
can possibly decide on such a step as marriage;" and searching
frantically for objections which she felt sure must exist, she fell
back on her first thought.  "What do you know about Mr. Brett?"

"I liked him better than any of the men I've met."

"You've not met _any_ yet," snapped Mrs. Hallam; she had no patience
with this nonsensical idea.  Then, as her girl was silent, she realised
that here too she had flung out a taunt mainly against her own theories.

Mrs. Hallam loved Helena with real devotion, and it was a torture now
to feel that possibly her care had all been a mistake; had all been
shipwrecked by the unexpected action of an extraordinary man.  She knew
for a fact--she had taken care--that she and he had not indulged in any
sentimental rubbish.  Mr. Brett had seemed to hate all that, and she
had for this very reason asked him round so often.  Helena and he had
been like boy and girl, brother and sister, playing games or finding
their dear jelly-fish and crabs together, whilst he had talked to her
in just the way to broaden her views out a bit yet not stretch them too
far.  And now----!

It really was provoking.  The silly girl--all girls were silly--would
of course exalt him into the fine figure of her first love, the real
man for her, the man that she was not allowed to marry....

Mrs. Hallam, always frail and white, seemed to shrink visibly beneath
this trouble.  She held out a thin hand to the puzzled Helena, and drew
her down beside her on the sofa.

"Look here, dear," she said gently; "I want to talk seriously to you.
Life isn't so easy as you think.  I've kept you here, safe from all
worries and responsibilities and guarded you so that everything has
seemed quite simple; but there _are_ worries and responsibilities.
You've got to live your life now, you see, Helena, and you will have to
learn the habit of making quick choices whether you go this way or
that.  Life is full of cross-roads, you will find, and not all of them
lead right.  You can't marry the first man you meet just because he
asks you to.  Later on you might meet some one who, you would then see,
is the man you ought to have married....  I don't want to put such
terrible ideas into your head, dear child; I've never spoken to you of
them, but such things have occurred and may occur again."

Helena was really quite excited.  This was the first, almost, she had
ever heard of life and it seemed utterly tremendous.  She was tired of
having choices made for her.  She felt a call to the cross-roads.  She
waited silently for more.

"You see, dear," went on Mrs. Hallam, pressing her child to her as
though she could not at all afford to let her go and be left all alone,
"you're young, very young, and though I've never told you, very
beautiful.  You need not fear about being an old maid!" whereat, half
laughing and half crying, she kissed Helena, too dazed almost to
respond.  "That will be possibly life's most important choice.  Don't
make it, darling child, until you're fit for it.  Stay with me," and
there was a pathetic appeal in her words, "stay with me till I've
taught you how to be reliant.  You are a child still; I've kept you
young; I hope I have been right; you're not fit to go out and grapple
with the world.  Stay with me, Helena; tell Mr. Brett that he must
wait, and stay here, in your home, until I've made you strong enough to
take your part in life."

"Stay here?" Helena repeated automatically.

For one brief moment the barred gates had swung open and she had gained
a glimpse at life, its dangers and responsibilities perhaps, but all
its splendid thrill and glorious chance.  The few cold words from her
prim mother had conjured up a rich glowing picture to this girl, who
for years had chafed at the narrow round, longing for something--she
knew not what, but something broader, something where she could be much
more herself--longing, she knew now, for freedom and for life.

Mrs. Hallam looked at her with pain in her eyes.

"Aren't you happy, haven't you been happy here?" she asked.

"Why of course I have, you dearest of dear old mums," cried Helena, and
pressed her lips against her mother's cheek; "but----," and she
hesitated.

"But----?" asked her mother, smiling sadly.  How ridiculous, how almost
tragic, it all was!  She threw back her mind to her own first romance
and wondered where the man was now.  "But----?  Tell me, dear.  I shall
quite understand and I am sure you need not feel afraid of me!"

Helena thought deeply.  Words were so difficult.

"But----," she said once again; and then, suddenly inspired, she
started rapidly; "Well, it is what you said just now.  I--I _must_ live
my own life.  I want--I want to grow.  I've not grown since I was
fifteen.  I felt so silly, like a child, when I was talking to--to Mr.
Brett, and I am twenty now."  She said this most imposingly.

"And so," said Mrs. Hallam, trying not to smile, "you want to marry Mr.
Brett because he made you feel so silly when you talked to him?"

Helena flushed, still sensitive to ridicule.  "I want to marry Mr.
Brett," she said with dignity, "because he is clever, and being a fool,
I admire cleverness more than anything in the whole world, and I
believe _he'd_ let me expand."

"Do you mean I have kept you back?" asked her mother, in low, earnest
tones.  She had accused herself.

"No, you've been splendid."  Helena patted her hand.  "No girl ever had
such a good mother....  And now you are going to be good about this
too, and not be troublesome and try to keep me here!"  She jumped up
and stood facing her, excitement and expectancy.

Mrs. Hallam was suddenly conscious of her weakness.

It had been so easy to be strong when she was dealing with a child--and
she had kept Helena a child.  Now, in this moment, she realised that
she was dealing with a woman, a woman of a stronger will.  Something,
Mr. Brett perhaps, had altered Helena.  Even her way of talking had
changed in an instant.

"Expand" and "troublesome"----!  She looked up and saw before her no
longer an obedient child, but a girl almost bursting with the desire to
live at nearly any cost.

Mrs. Hallam was naturally alarmed.  She knew that any contest of the
wills was useless.  She fell back upon pathos.

"Helena dear," she said weakly, "you're twenty now.  I don't want to
dictate to you, to treat you as a child.  You have the right, as you
say, to live your own life.  But do you think it right," and now her
voice grew very feeble, very plaintive, "after I've done all I have for
you, not to think of me at all?"

"What do you mean?" asked Helena with quite an emphasis upon the second
word.  She felt a dim mistrust of this new tone.  She had been kindlier
to opposition, for indeed at the moment she almost longed to fight.

Mrs. Hallam, anxious to explain, to justify once and for all, began
again at the beginning.

"All these years, dear child, though you did not, could not of course
guess it, I've been moulding you according to a theory of my own; not a
new theory but what is far better, one that has stood the test of
centuries.  I wanted to form your character, your will, before you were
brought face to face with life.  That process is not quite complete
yet, although you seem to think it is."  She spoke the last words
rather bitterly, then with a sudden change to gentleness, went on, "But
even if it had been, do you think that when I've given up the best
years of my life to you, it is fair for you to dash away, leaving me
alone, and not to give me the reward of spending a few pleasant years
with the dear child I have helped to form?"

She smiled lovingly, but Helena looked coldly back at her.  It was the
other's point of view, to her, which was not fair.

"I don't see that," she answered almost fiercely, surprised at her own
words, oddly unlike herself of one hour ago and many years before.
"_That's_ not living your own life a bit.  _You_ didn't give those best
years of your life to your mother.  I shall often see you, and I expect
you did yours.  You gave the best years of your life to your daughter,
you say, and I want to give my best years to mine."

Mrs. Hallam loathed excitement, thinking it bad form; but now she
raised her voice.  "My dear!" she cried.  "Where did you get these most
extraordinary notions?  Was it from this Mr. Brett?"

"You said you liked all his ideas so much," laughed Helena, "and yet
you're shocked because I want to marry him!"

"There is a difference, dear," retorted Mrs. Hallam, her calmness
regained, "between liking a man's ideas and caring for him as a
son-in-law."

Helena, however, in her new mood wanted something more direct than
generalities.  "What have you got against him then?" she flashed.

Mrs. Hallam spread her thin hands soothingly.  "Nothing, dear,
absolutely nothing.  Do not let us have a scene.  I thought him a
charming man; possibly rather self-centred, but clever, cultured, and
with, I am sure, good motives.  I feel certain he will do extremely
well.  If you had wished to marry him in five years--but at
twenty----!"  She spoke as though it were fourteen.

"Well," remarked Helena slowly, as though reviewing the whole situation
from impartial ground, "I suppose the wedding won't be to-morrow.
Don't you usually wait a bit?"

Her mother noticed that there was no hypothesis--no "wouldn't
be"--about it.  She saw no good in a conflict.  The girl was twenty,
the man probably twelve or more years older; there was nothing, she
almost regretfully admitted, to be said against him; they had seemed
good chums.  Most mothers would have been delighted, for he was making
himself a name as a novelist.  Yet she was not, for he had come with
this preposterously worded letter to wreck all her plans.  She had
thought him so safe, from the mere fact that he had no romance or
sentiment about him.  He was so safe, yes, for Helena; a real platonic
friendship; opening her eyes a little to the bigger world outside, but
altogether to be trusted not to put ridiculous ideas into her head.  He
was the first man with whom she had ever trusted Helena at all alone,
and now----!

"Mother," laughed Helena, suddenly clasping her fondly round the neck,
"I can see from your cross face you _do_ mean to be troublesome!  Now
just be good instead and say that we may be at any rate engaged?  It
will be such fun, and we can see then how we feel about it."

Mrs. Hallam by now knew with all certainty that she was weak.  She felt
a vague sense of relief that Helena had asked permission; at one moment
she had not expected that....  If she refused it, what would be the
end?  Possibly elopement, suicide, or some other of those awful means
that modern girls employed so freely....  Whereas if she said yes, she
still retained her grip as mother and might use what authority she had
to disillusion slowly this girl, who looked on her engagement as mere
fun.

"Very well, my own dear daughter," she said and suddenly found herself
crying.

To Helena also things had turned out otherwise than she expected.  She
had not ever thought that she would get her mother's leave.  For one
moment it was almost a shock!  She felt suddenly thrust out beyond
recall upon a journey all mysterious to her.  She was not sure, now,
that she ever meant to do more than assert her right to do just as she
wanted.

Did she want to marry Hubert Brett?  She was not really sure.

She wanted certainly to get away from Home....

Five more years of this--that was what her mother hinted at--five more
years of being ignorant, of seeing no one, knowing nothing about
anything that mattered, being just your mother's daughter--five more
wasted years!...

So that, after having dried her mother's tears and told her, very
truly, how much she had always and would always love her, she hurried
upstairs to her writing-desk with quite a new sensation of life being a
most vital and palpitating thing.  Her days had been all terribly
alike: this was so different and thrilling!

The only thing was--how did one begin?

She wished she had asked Mother.  She couldn't very well go down and
ask her now.  Besides, she might just change her mind.

"Mr." looked so stiff like that; yet she did not like, quite, to call
him Hubert yet.

She gave a little laugh of excitement.  What fun it all was!  She
wondered if other people felt like this, when they were getting
married.  They probably knew all about it?

Oh yes, of course; she'd go by his letter....

But no; because when _he_ wrote they were not engaged!

So finally she thought it best to leave a blank and start straight off--


"I really don't know at all what I ought to say.  I am no good at
letters and this is very difficult, but I too enjoyed all our walks and
things, and if you really want to marry me I don't see why we shouldn't
be engaged.  I liked you very much down here and hope I shall make you
happy.  Mother doesn't seem very keen about it, I think she thinks I am
too young though I am twenty, but she has given her consent and will, I
am sure, come round to it, so don't worry.

"I'm afraid you'll think this letter very stupid, but you know how
ashamed I always was of my ignorance.  I seem to know nothing!  It is
very nice indeed of any one like you to care for me.

"Yours,
  "HELENA HALLAM.

"P.S.--You won't be able to tease me any more about my name,
afterwards!"


Perhaps to any real anthologist or expert of love-letters this would
seem but little better than the attempt it answered; yet if success
must be judged by results, it cannot have been much amiss, since for
the first time in his life Hubert Brett was melted to a display of
ridiculous emotion.  "Dear little girl!" he murmured aloud and kissed
the last words before her signature.

As for Helena, having run out to the village and posted the letter
unread by her mother--a cause of yet further misgiving to the
theorist--she began to wonder ever so little whether she had done quite
wisely.

From somewhere (who can say whence, since some things are inborn in
Man?) she had got the notion, possibly ridiculous, that courting and
proposals were quite different from this.  Even in the Lives and comic
papers men knelt and that sort of thing.  She felt she had been cheated
rather of Romance.

As things were, with her so ignorant and Mother like that, it was all a
little of a worry.

But it was also a way out....




CHAPTER IV

HYMEN

If Hubert had known how difficult a job it was to get married, he would
never have attempted it.  Or so at least he told himself.  All Boyd's
advice, all his own misgivings about lonely age, all Ruth's scenes,
would not have driven him to so much real hard work that had no
definite connection with his mapped and beloved life-career.

He always had imagined that the thing took half an hour, and even then
was managed by some luckless friend you roped in as best man.  And here
he was, worried all day about presents, relatives, guests, leases,
settlements, and heaven itself even probably could not say what else,
till he despaired about his autumn work.

Ruth, in particular, drove him almost frantic.

He was absolutely certain she loathed his marrying, and yet to judge
from the outside, nothing in the whole world could have pleased her
more than making the arrangements.  She would talk for forty minutes
about buying six new pairs of socks.  Her air of Willing Service
maddened him.  When she had nothing else to do, she would divide her
time between telling him that he was a cold lover and assuring him that
there was no need whatsoever to worry about her.  _She_ would be all
right.  He mustn't think of _her_....

"I don't," he would hurl back at length, firmly convinced of her
hypocrisy (he was a great believer in his intuitions), at which point
she usually cried.  Then he would go out and shake the pictures crooked
by slamming the door.  At their next meeting, all forgiveness, Ruth
would take up again the subject of those socks.

Finally he abandoned all idea of finishing his novel.  This would be
the first blank autumn since he started writing.  He felt cross with
Fate.

In all this, romanticists will no doubt be gratified to hear, Helena
was the sole consolation.

He was pleased with her--and he was pleased with his own cleverness in
having lit upon her.  If marriage was essential to him, he felt sure
she was just the very girl to be a wife who wouldn't get upon his
nerves.  The more he saw of her, the more he liked her; and that, too,
was encouraging.  She had, of course, come up to London with her
mother, no less busy than himself, and her delight with the great
shapeless place--its crowds, its fogs, its lights--was beautiful to
see.  She never wanted to be taken to theatres or show-places; the
spectacle of London being London was enough for her, as it should be,
indeed, for any one.  She loved the ceaseless motion, the sense of
something getting done; the whole feeling of energy massed in a little
space seemed to inspire this girl used only to the sleepy, uneventful
fields.

"Well, and how do you like it?  How does it strike you?" he asked, as
from an omnibus he showed her, for the first time, that thrilling crowd
which passes, ant-like, this way and that, seemingly purposeless yet
always full of purpose, past the Bank of England.  He loved to hear her
quaint, unformed ideas.

Helena thought for a moment.  "It makes me feel so _useless_," she
replied.

She was a delightful child, Hubert told himself--unspoilt, original,
and modest.  When he forgot about his ruined novel, he certainly was
happy.  His unhid admiration helped a little to melt Mrs. Hallam, who
was still looking pathetically for the absolute objection which she
felt sure she ought at last to find.  And all this while the day was
coming near.

Mrs. Hallam had rather naturally planned that the wedding should take
place in Devonshire; but the bridegroom had been so hideously shocked,
and Helena thought a London wedding so much better "fun," that Mrs.
Hallam, already feeling nobody, had given in to them with a weak smile.
She did not mind where it took place, so long as they were happy and it
was really for the best.  Besides, she had a brother who lived in a big
house in Langham Place.  He always had been very mean, and was a
bachelor, and it was time altogether that he did something for the
family....

On the last night, however, before the wedding-day, she tuned herself
at bedtime to a final effort.  She was sad and depressed: they had
talked long downstairs; her own instinct would have been to cry or go
to sleep; but she decided that, for her own later peace of mind if for
no higher motive, she must do something far less pleasant.  So along
she went to the second-best spare-room in the mean brother's house.

"Helena dear," she said, to meet her daughter's startled look, "I've
come along, although we've had our talk downstairs, because I feel I
can't sleep till I have asked you a question."

Helena was not greatly reassured.  She had not really understood a lot
of what her mother had sobbed out to her downstairs, and now when she
had thought it all over and had been feeling very sorry for the poor
lonely dear, there was to be another question!

"Why, what?" she asked, trying to put away unseen her going-away hat,
which she had been trying on.  She was afraid her mother might think it
unfeeling.

"A very important question," answered Mrs. Hallam, dropping frailly on
the sofa.  "And I'm afraid you may think it an extraordinary one.  Do
you really love Hubert?  Do you really want to marry him?"

Helena let go of the hat, which fell very gently on the floor beside
the dressing-table; then she went across and put her arms around her
mother.

"Why, you curious old dear," she said.  "What on earth makes you ask
that?  I _do_ call it extraordinary!"  And she laughed.

But her mother was serious.  "Don't think it would be wrong or wicked
to say no if you do not.  It would be very wicked not to...."  She
paused, and as Helena said nothing, she went on; "You see, darling
child, I feel responsible.  You are so young, and Mr. Brett being
almost the first man you ever spoke to, except just at At Homes and so
on----  It's not too late, my dear girl, although perhaps I should have
spoken sooner if I could have brought myself to it.  Girls often see
more clearly at the last.  We can easily announce that the wedding is
postponed, and then you could come down home for a few months and
see--if you're not sure----"

She spoke almost keenly by now, questioning with a hope quite pathetic.
The world for her held nothing but her daughter.

In Helena, however, the words raised a depressing vision.

Home--Devonshire--the lanes and muddy fields--the vicar--the
farmyard--the illustrated papers--the picked novels--the dull
people--her dear, good mother's absurd care of her....  And then,
flashing and dazzling by its contrast, London--its crowds and
mystery--its freedom--Hubert, so brilliant and kind--those jolly times
with him beside the sea or on the 'bus-tops--the talks on Art and Life
and all the things she couldn't understand but longed to--the liberty
to cease being a fool and ignorant--the open gate to real existence....

"I _am_ sure," she answered, with a passion that surprised herself.
"Quite sure."  She was not sure about love, but she wished to marry....

Hubert, in fact, wanted to escape his fond sister and a lone old age;
Helena desired to get away from a loving home and her own ignorance.
It is quite possible to fall in love with even negative abstractions.

At any rate they were very fond of one another, and practised
wedding-goers were able to make their usual remark: "How utterly
devoted they seem!  It is so nice to see them look at one another!"

Everybody said too, of course, that Helena had never looked so pretty.
She had been arranging presents until one o'clock and not left time to
get her hair in order, besides having been dog-tired for a week, and
the wedding-veil is seldom becoming, but all the guests seemed pleased.
Certainly, with bright eyes sparkling ever so gaily behind the old veil
of Argentan lace, and little wisps of hair exuding everywhere, Helena,
if not at her best, looked natural and young.

Hubert, on the other hand, looked old for his age and self-conscious as
only a man can look at his own wedding, but yet unusually handsome.  He
had not recovered from the dismal farce of a bachelor dinner, where
nobody had liked the champagne, the idea of speeches had fizzled out,
and every one had gone home before ten o'clock.  He was pale and
nervous.  Yet Helena's relatives decided quite honestly, and in fact
unexpectedly, that he was a good-looking man, and even Helena was quite
surprised.  His new Sunday coat revealed a slim, tall figure generally
hidden by old, well-loved tweeds, for he was not a London-dresser.  A
stiff collar made the greatest change in him, and (had he but guessed!)
so soon she decided he must always wear one.  His very agony improved
his looks.  Of the dark, clear-cut type, he was spoilt usually by a too
erratic mouth, which rambled on his face and lent a look of weakness to
the stern contour.  To-day his lips were pressed and firm.  He felt a
fool and told himself that the whole business was astounding rubbish.
If only she had liked it, he would have been married at a
registrar's--or down in Devonshire!...  He went about with an air of
doom among the revellers, and all of them said once again, if with more
truth than about Helena, that they had never seen him look so well.

"Only shows," whispered Mrs. Boyd, who did not love him or any author
over-much, "that those artistic people could easily look gentlemen.
It's nothing but a pose."

None the less, it was a genuine enough relief to Hubert when the time
came at which he was able to go upstairs and shed his fair raiment.
True, they were not his old tweeds that he was allowed to don, nor was
the collar soft; but still he felt more himself as he hastily descended
one flight and then waited ten minutes, with all of a new husband's
still untamed impatience, for his wife to be ready.

At last, when he was within four minutes of being able to feel
justified in shouting out that they would miss their train, Helena
appeared: full of amused excitement, still thinking it all the greatest
of great fun and very sweet in a quite married-looking velvet gown,
with the most colossal muff that matched a very cloud of furs, and over
all of it a plume that waved above her never steady hat until it looked
like a pillar of thin smoke.

Hubert, all impatience, quite forgot to say that she looked charming.
It was really lucky she had not been taught yet to expect it.

"Come along," he said instead.  "We're getting a bit late.  I rather
dread this part!"

"Oh, I don't know," she laughed.  She had loved all of it.

They went down to the lower flight, where all the guests were
pitilessly ranged on each side of the broad Georgian stairs.

Of course there was the funny man, who will happen even in the
best-born families.  Perhaps he has some use at such a time as this.
Ruth and Mrs. Hallam, both united in feeling tearful yet mutually
hostile, found amusement in his constant parrot-cry of "Here they are!"
or when he felt specially inspired, even "Here they aren't!"  It was a
relief to have any excuse at all to laugh.

And there at length they were, smiling gaily, shaking countless hands,
quailing under genial pats, avoiding silver horseshoes and gold
slippers.  (Rice and confetti were vetoed by the mean brother.)  And so
into the car, with Ruth and Mrs. Hallam smiling crookedly through
tears, until the funny man, dutifully fumbling with string and an old
slipper, was lost in a vast cloud of steam or something white let out
by the fresh-started engine, which sent the couple off amid a bellow of
good-omened laughter, and every one surged in with relief to say
good-bye and to agree they should have gone away much earlier.  It had
been hideously long, but weddings always were.

Helena, as a corner blotted out the house, came back into the car with
a gay laugh.

"Got your camera, my dear?" asked Hubert.  It is odd how soon a man
acquires the air of a proprietor.

"I _wish_ I'd thought of taking them as we went off," said Helena.
"They looked so funny."

He made no reply.  He seemed to be thinking.  She wondered what about.
Then, as he sat silent, she began to be afraid to interrupt his
thoughts.  Besides, she did not know quite what to say.  It was so
curious!  She realised, with rather a shock, how little really she knew
about this man, and here she was going away alone with him for life!...
But probably brides always felt like that?  It was a biggish thing to
do, anyhow, getting married.  She expected it would feel a bit funny
with any one.  Probably the man made very little difference....

And presently he spoke--if it is speaking to say, "Ah!"

They were at Charing Cross.

They had agreed to take old baggage and look a very long-established
couple, but somehow porters and people were nudging each other with
sympathetic joy long before they reached the first-class carriage with
its wickedly big label marked "engaged."

Helena, embarrassed if amused, sat on the far side.  Hubert leaned out
of the window and bought all the evening papers.  He knew that there
had been reporters.

"May as well see what they put," he said, almost as though in apology.
She could not understand his tones, but Mother had told her last night
that men were funny things with curious ideas.

He took up one after another and flipped through them all.

"Solemnised--Langham Place--écru lace," he read from the first; and
then more hurriedly, "Reception--residence--numerous and costly--happy
couple--Riviera."

Judging from his extracts, Helena thought, they were all very much
alike.  She wondered if one man had written the whole lot, and if so,
what all the rest of the reporters did.

Her husband's face grew blacker as he reached the last.  He threw it
down with a contemptuous laugh.

"Why, what is it?" she asked.  "Don't you like them?"  She still felt
oddly shy about using his name.  "Are you disappointed?"

"One doesn't expect much from journalists," he said.  "One's never
disappointed."

But he was.

One account said that he was "a" novelist, but that was all: no
adjective before it, not even "well-known."  The others didn't mention
that he _was_ an author.

They might have been just ordinary people.




PART II

HUBERT BRETT'S WIFE


CHAPTER V

ROUTINE

It was something of a career, Helena soon learnt, to be the wife of
Hubert Brett.

Gradually, however, she got a grip of the rough lines of her whole
duty.  At first it had been difficult, for she was not methodical by
nature; but now it all seemed natural, the ordinary thing.  When you
got into it, the day ran smoothly.  She never even had to think by now.
She had the housemaid's mind.

Everything in the little garden suburb home--for Hubert, capitulating
to Kenneth Boyd all along the whole line, had settled out at
Hampstead--every smallest detail was ordered to one end: the Work.

This, he reminded her so soon as they returned to England, was not just
his pride or hobby: it was their existence.  She had her three hundred
pounds a year, which he wished her to keep, whilst his fixed income was
a trifle less--his father had been that fatal sort of mongrel, half a
cleric, half a City man--and for the rest they must depend upon his
writing.  How important then, but how essential, that he should be left
free to do his very best.

"You're my little housekeeper," he told her playfully the first
evening, always loving to treat her as a child.  "You'll get new cooks
about every other day and try new dishes out of shilling books with
them, and I shall say: 'My dear, this isn't edible'--like that--and
then you'll cry----"

"Oh no, I shan't!" she laughed back, for they got on extremely well in
an unsentimental way.  It was almost as though Hubert had merely
exchanged his sister for a younger one.

"Well, I like to think you will," he answered.  "I shall be hurt if you
don't mind in the least when I'm cross....  But what I was going to say
is: whatever domestic tragedies there are--and kitchens are the last
home in England of poor Tragedy--don't bring them round to me.  I don't
mind _what_ I eat, I'm very tame that way really; but I don't want to
know who cooked the chop or where the large woman who cooked the last
one is.  Those details don't inspire an author, even with a realistic
novel!"  The which she thought great fun.  She loved to hear him talk.

None the less, it was not easy just at first.  There was a hideous lot
to remember for any one not good at lessons.  The kitchen with its rows
of plates, and all the currants and things you served out from
tins--this was quite splendid.  The hours and what you mustn't do were
the real worries.

Hubert Brett, in the old days of city life, had never breakfasted till
half-past nine.  "They sleep in the city, and more is the pity, but you
on the hills, awake!" exhorts the Harrow song.  But Hubert did not see
it in that light at all.  Nine-thirty had been his hour down in London;
nine-thirty seemed quite good enough up on the Hampstead hills.  So
nine-thirty it was--when it was not nine-forty-five.

This was the one fixed meal of the day....  Now work put in its claim.

At breakfast, he told people, was the only time that he could skim the
daily; he was so intensely busy; and certainly he propped the
_Telegraph_ before him on the table every morning (this shocked Helena
at first, for she had not seen any farces and had no notion it was ever
done); but somehow or other he appeared never to have quite finished
just the paragraph that he was reading when the meal concluded.  There
was an armchair temptingly near alike to table, fire, and cigarettes.

Helena's first important duty was to steer him tactfully from this
chair to the harder one whereon he sat to write.  She must not jar him,
must not hurry him, or he lost every one of his ideas, and it was all
her fault at lunch....  But, on the other hand, she must not let him
sit there, gazing at a thrice-read page--"thinking out my day's work,"
he called it--till too late.  This she certainly did not desire to do,
for Lily never was allowed to come and clear the meal away till he had
gone into his study (that upset him, too), so that delay bred chaos in
the household.

When once, however, he was safely at his writing-table, all was quiet,
must be, until lunch-time.  These were his best hours for work.  The
small house brooded under a funereal silence.

Lunch was a movable affair.

Hubert could not endure clocks in his working-room.  Their sound, which
he declared was just not regular, got on his nerves, and he found
himself on days when his inspiration would not flow, gazing at the dial
with growing despair, like a bad sleeper who begins to count the hours
which strike at ever lessening intervals, until he knows at last that
now he will not sleep at all.

The writer's estimate of time varied largely with the amount of his
success.  When he was writing well, the hours would speed away and he
would then emerge at half-past two or even--once--at three, full of a
joy so intense as to ignore, or even to melt, the iciness of Helena and
Lily.  At other times, when his pen dragged itself along the paper
sleepily or idly drew vague circles on the blotting-pad, he would get
tired and hungry.  On these days lunch was punctual at one o'clock.

After lunch, which was a meal solid almost to the limits of bad art, he
would subside on the tempting armchair again and Helena be asked to
bring him the weekly reviews.  Not only the literary pages were
digested; Hubert read the music, art, even the drama
columns--everything except the science meetings in the _Athenæum_.
This took, roughly, half-an-hour each day and the lonely time so
occupied, he told Helena when he explained his ways to her, was devoted
to "keeping in touch with the modern movements."  There is no one
English word for the Italian _siesta_.

Then came the part of the day to which Helena looked forward; the
afternoon, when they took ever such long tramps with Spook, the small
white Aberdeen, across the wide free heath, and so home to tea beside a
comfortable fire.  Helena could almost hate his work when at the stroke
of five he would get up, more stern by now than in the sleepy morn, and
leave her with the statutory kiss.  And when it rained, so that this
jolliest part of the day was lost and he said in a masculine way that
it would be a chance to do some letters (instead of having fun
indoors!), she would sit by the drenched windows and look out through
the jerky raindrops with all the pathetic grievance against Fate of
children in a seaside lodging on wet holidays.

This was a shorter bout of work and dinner was generally not later than
half-past seven, though there were times of course when it had to be
later.  This led to Hubert's prophecy about the change of cooks not
being too far from inspired.

After dinner was the other jolly time, if Hubert had worked well.  If
things had gone badly, he would mope and say that he was going to grow
cabbages instead and silly things like that, which worried her because
she knew he never would; but if a good sheaf of written paper was in
his hand, he would read it to her, while she sat against his legs upon
the hearthrug, and when she had said how good it was, they talked of
other things--he talked so well--and it was all as comfy as could be in
their own little home, and, oh, so different from Devonshire!

Sometimes she felt guilty about her poor mother, down there all alone
among those stodgy people; but she wrote to her every Sunday, and
sometimes on other days if Hubert was silent and gloomy (without of
course letting her know why she wrote).

His moods puzzled her a good deal in those first days, but she supposed
all really clever men were a bit odd or they would not be clever.
Certainly it was curious that Hubert, who was so strong and splendid in
most ways, was so awfully easily pleased or upset by anything about his
books.  Any success made him as cheery as could be and they would go to
Kew or somewhere and he'd say; "Blow the evening work!" although she
always said she was not sure they ought.  Once, a few months after the
wedding, a reader wrote to him from Surbiton and thanked him for a book
of his he had just read, because he thought it beautiful and full of
inspiriting ideas.  Of course she had been immensely pleased, but
Hubert had been more.  He had shown it to every one who called for
three weeks, and kept on wondering what sort of person could have
written it, and left it about on tables, and she was sure the servants
read it, and he told Mr. Alison about it twice, until she really began
to wonder whether people wouldn't laugh at him, but didn't say so
because he was so sensitive.

It was always the same, about a good review or anything.  Sometimes,
after one, he would ask in a thoughtful, puzzled way; "Why don't we
ever go to a theatre, dear?" but by the next night something had
probably upset him or he forgot, and she never reminded him because he
_did_ work hard--and, as he said, for _her_--and she was really very
happy in their little home, so long as he was not at work.

And then, he was so easily upset.

A bad review had just the opposite effect.  He got so violent about the
critics, saying they were men who had failed to create, and any ass
could say that elephants were rotten things but it took God to make
one, and other awful things like that; or else he'd begin thinking who
of his pals read the paper where the criticism was and sometimes
even--if she couldn't stop him--write and tell them why the critic was
so down on him, which she was half afraid they must think very silly;
unless, perhaps, they were clever too, so understood.

Once, too, at the end of the first year, he quite frightened her.

Among their wedding presents, duly numerous and costly--perhaps extreme
in both respects for a suburban home--the one that Helena prized and
used most was an enamelled watch.  It was the size, roughly, of a
shilling: deep translucent blue, decked with tiny pearls, and hung from
an appropriate brooch by a thin golden chain.  Too thin possibly, for
on arrival home one morning from what she called her marketing, the
little gewgaw, valued for ornament and use alike, was gone.  A few
links of the chain hung desolately from a brooch that, robbed of its
purpose, now looked almost vulgar.

Without thinking, without reflecting that no one was allowed to
interrupt him before lunch-time, she found her thoughts turning
restfully, in quite a wifely way, to Hubert.  She knocked at his door.

There was no answer but she had not waited for one.  She burst in.

The room was full of industry.  The very air seemed heavy with a
wished-for silence.  A clock would have been overpowering.

Hubert swung slowly round, with an expression on his face that made it
clear he was attempting not to lose touch with some great idea.  He
kept a finger on the sheet before him.

Helena was rather alarmed.  She had not seen his study in its present
state, and as she stood there at the door a moment, her eyes took in
the litter of loose paper; all the open books on table, chairs, and
floor; the derelict type-writer, long abandoned as fatal to all
inspiration; the velvet coat; and most of all, the worried look.  Her
plaint shrank instantly to an excuse.

"Oh Hugh," she said (she never could quite manage "Hubert"), "I _am_ so
sorry, but what do you think?"

"I can't imagine," he said in a cold voice so unlike his own.  "What?
Is your mother dead?"

Even Helena, so bad at scenting irony, could guess that he did not mean
that.

"Of course she isn't," she replied; "but I've lost the lovely little
watch she gave me, and I did love it so."  She tried not to let too
much sorrow come into her voice.  He always looked upon her as a baby,
anyhow.

Surely he was sorry?  He said nothing.  He looked at her so oddly that
she grew alarmed.

"Isn't it awful?" she added uneasily.

Hubert rose slowly to his feet.  "Really, Helena," he said, "you don't
mean you've broken my whole morning's work just to tell me you've lost
some silly trinket?  You might have waited until lunch-time.  Now, my
whole chapter--well, it simply means I've got to start it all again."

He took up a sheet of paper, tore it dramatically through, and let the
two halves fall upon the carpet.  Helena, full of an astounded guilt,
looked down to see how much of his work her thoughtlessness had wasted.
But all the writing must have been upon the under side....

"Oh, Hugh dear," she said, longing to touch him yet not daring quite;
he looked so cross and tall.  "I _am_ sorry.  It was stupid of me.  But
I thought you'd be sorry and could--could do something."

She ended lamely and he was not touched by her faith in him.

"Of course," he said bitterly, "I shall at once scour the heath, like a
police dog, on my hands and knees.  I shall watch the termini.  I shall
telephone----"

"Oh, I _am_ sorry," she broke in, "awfully.  I never thought all that
of course.  I simply felt it was so terrible and you might help,
because you always know about things, somehow."

That touched him at last.  He melted suddenly.

"Well," he said quite cheerily, "it's done now, so bother the old work.
We'll see if we can't find the thing and save a reward.  That's another
way of making money, eh?"

So after cross-examination as to routes and so on, out they went, and
he it was who found the watch, exactly where--she now remembered--she
had felt hot and pulled hard at the stiff clip of her chinchilla stole.

"Tally-ho!" he shouted gaily, holding it aloft and waving it; then as
she ran delightedly across from her own line of search, "so I've not
wasted my day's work in vain!"

She felt that more apologies must take the place of thanks.  She also
wished that she had never spoilt his work but paid five pounds reward
instead.  And she resolved that nothing short of thieves or fire would
take her into his room before lunch again.

Bad news, hereafter, she obediently kept till dinner.  His day's work
was over, and he had recovered by next morning's bout.

Other things, too, she learnt.  When possible, she would suppress a bad
review or lose the paper until evening.  Unluckily, he had them all
sent by an agency and she did not often succeed.  She always said,
however, that nobody went by that paper....  She never praised a writer
who was younger and more famous than himself.  She was conveniently
blind if envelopes arrived addressed in his own writing.  She always
saw that his room was left properly untidy--all except the flowers,
which must never show the slightest sign of age.  She came to avoid the
word "reliable" and after six months never once split an infinitive at
meals.  Hubert at such moments would throw down his knife with a
grimace of pain.  He said it was a physical sensation, like cut corks,
and spoilt his appetite, which she could never understand.  And
sometimes if it happened early in the day, she found at night that she
had spoilt his work as well....

Such was the routine of Hubert Brett, ex-bachelor at thirty-five and
writer of repute; all sacred and to be taken as an earnest matter--even
that half-hour wherein he Kept In Touch With Modern Movements.

Helena learnt this, too, early.

There had been great excitement in the suburb after lunch.  An
aeroplane had passed upon its way to Hendon, and passed very low.  The
noise had been colossal, like six motorcycles.  Every one, used as the
place was to aeroplanes, had dashed out to the garden--every one but
Hubert.  Helena, even in her disappointment, could admire his
self-restraint.

He seemed quite ignorant about it, too, when she made jokes upon the
noise, as they set out for their tramp on the Heath.

"What time about?" he said.  "Before lunch?"

"Why, Hugh," she laughed.  "You must have heard!  It sounded like a
motor having its teeth drilled."

"No," he said.  "I shouldn't have missed that.  It is a sound I've
never struck!"

She thought a moment.  "Why, I know," she said.  "You wouldn't have
heard.  Of course it was just after two and you were still keeping in
touch with the movements."

To her surprise he stopped short, and looking up, she saw his cheeks
were flushed below the eyes.

"My dear girl," he said pompously.  "I enjoy your humourous way of
looking at life, but it's a quite impossible position if a wife's going
to be funny at the expense of her husband's ideals."

With which he strode onward and she fell in, a model wife, behind.

But she, of her simplicity, had meant it.

She had always admired his powers of concentration on those dull old
literary weeklies.  She had not even thought of sleep.

Every wife, perhaps, should be able to see through her husband the
exact distance that he sees himself.




CHAPTER VI

GROWTH

Helena, when a year's passing had worn away the novelty of keeping
house and made its process slower, was naturally rather bored at times,
when Hubert was shut up with his work.  No one could have been happier
so long as she was with her husband; she still thought him immensely
clever, which is most good for married happiness; still found their
walks and treats the very greatest fun; but in the winter especially,
there were so many gaps of idle loneliness.

Luckily the remedy was near at hand.

To a girl almost bursting with the ashamed desire for self-development
a garden suburb must be Paradise indeed.  There is a natural connection
between New Art cottages with gardens round, and (let us say)
enthusiasms.  The ordinary man--that tame myope who gratefully accepts
life as it is--contentedly exists in squares, crescents and straight
lines; breathing the common air and never worrying at all whether his
house, which may be number 246, has individuality or not.  But the
enthusiast, whom others call by a less noble title, is of a different
sort.  He holds that what we see and breathe, especially when young, we
are.  His children, then, must have a quite uncommon setting; not grown
like the sordid brats in 245 "desirable villas" adjoining.  No, they
must live where there is air and a big back-yard patch; where the word
garden throws a soft glamour over muddied and unfinished roads; where
everything is beautiful and man himself is not so vile.

For, after all, he asks, what really wicked man would ever trouble to
live out at a tube's end?  No!  Vice ever lurks among the fogs and
shrubless rabbit-warrens of mid-London.  It would not flourish in a
garden suburb.

So out he goes, and sees to it that his house shall have something
different from all the other small white dwellings round about him.  An
architect might say that there was neither use nor fitness in his
timbered turret at the north-east corner, but he himself knows just why
it is there.  He knows that he has flung his little pebble, all he can
avail, upon the heap that some day, we all hope, will crush the
soul-destroying isms out of life, and make of man, not a type in
monotone, but a great hive of multi-coloured individuals.

So far, so good; but more remains to tell.

He settles proudly underneath his turret and waits for the great change
to start.  The neighbours call and he discovers they are cultured.
They are very cultured.  And he--with a sick horror he knows at length
that he is not.  All these people here have something different, not a
mere turret--something different about themselves.  Menzies believes
that eating sheep is murder in the sight of Heaven, and the same with
cows.  Du Cane will not let his children wear boots, because the notion
is not Greek.  Farren is convinced that you must sleep with your feet
to the south and your head, of course, in the opposite direction.
Blythe-Egerton believes in ghosts but says they can't have clothes.
Jerningham lives next the golf club house, an envied site, and holds
success in games has always been the first precursor of a nation's
downfall.  Escott knows exactly who should marry what; whilst Ferguson
can quite explain the Post-Impressionists, but fails to understand the
Royal Academy--peculiar in a Scotchman.  Yes, every single one of them
has some outstanding gift or knowledge, making him a pleasant man to
meet.

So out he goes, post-haste, to search a quality, and wishes now that he
had not spent all that extra money upon his symbolic turret.  He knows
a better secret, now, of how real individuality is gained.  It consists
not in bricks and mortar nor in any latticed garden-work--though these
may be its outward signs--but in a being different.  He hurries out and
buys the works of Chesterton and Bernard Shaw as a beginning.

Helena, of course, was predisposed to it since Devonshire.

She did not long to become different, so much: she hankered to cease
being ignorant.

Hubert was so clever, but that discouraged more than it helped her.  He
talked quite brilliantly about such deep things, but he would not
explain.  He laughed and said she was a jolly child.  He always treated
her rather as one and certainly they had great fun together, but she
longed to be clever without getting old, and when she had told him so,
he simply laughed and said she ought to be content to have such quaint
ideas.

"It's far better," he added, "to be original than clever.  Don't you
worry your dear little head with dull ideas and facts."

But Helena did worry.

She had now, apart from her old desire for self-development and
knowledge about life, all these dull lonely hours to fill; and as she
went about, slowly getting to know the people near, she found like our
enthusiast that every one of them was full of something--some vital,
all-absorbing topic, if nothing more than golf or their own handicap.
And that, she saw at once, was what she had to have if she wished ever
to make her life really full.  She could not go to matinées, like some,
or Hubert missed her all the afternoon; and if they went to an At Home,
he always dashed away at five, which looked so rude, and people--she
felt sure--said afterwards that she could not have much hold over him,
so soon.  She tried novels, but these she really could not understand.
Hubert watched cynically her attempts to get at grips with a sex-novel
more sexual than is expected even in these days of censorships and free
advertisement.

"But, Hubert," she said finally, "why did she do that?  Wasn't she fond
of her husband?  He seems quite nice.  Do these terrible things really
happen?"

"Oh no," he answered, as one would speak to a child.  "Of course they
never happen really."

Helena looked puzzled.  "Then why do people write or read them?" she
asked.

"My dear girl," he answered in the heavy-father manner that gave him
such pleasure, "if you could answer that, you would have solved one of
the most interesting problems about human nature!"

So then she was puzzled again and laid aside the book half read, before
she got even to the chapter that was really censured and commonly read
first.

Not that way, she saw, lay illumination.

At last she tried another road.  "You know," she said reflectively one
night, during those long hearthside chats that neither really would
have changed for any other social form, "I like all the people here and
so on, but they're terribly busy, aren't they, and I always feel I've
sort of come too late."

"How sort of?" he replied indulgently.

"Well, I've got no real friends and you're busy so much with your dull
old work.  Don't you know anybody?--really know, I mean--old friends,
who aren't too far away?"

Hubert thought for a few moments.  "It sounds absurd," he said at last,
"but I was such a hermit till I met you that I don't believe I've got a
single woman friend."

Helena, he noticed, was not flattered in the least degree.  That sort
of thing was what made her so splendid.  He told himself that a woman
who was womanly would be a bore about the house, and smiled adoringly
on his own child-like specimen, who waited silently, as though quite
sure that he would find a friend in the same way that after some time
he had found her brooch.  But there was a long pause and he made no
suggestions.

"Well, what about men then?" she added simply.  "I don't mind."

And he was once again enchanted by her naïveté.

"You shall have the pick of all my man-friends," he said, and then
puzzled her by laughing.

"What is it?" she asked.

"Oh, you're so perfect, dearest!" he said, and got up and kissed her.

It needed some thought, none the less.  Of his old pals--he suddenly
remembered that he had been married over a year now, and not seen any
one of them or wanted to--there were not many who lived near, and some
of these ... well, they were all right in their way, but vaguely he
felt they were not quite fit to introduce to any one so sweet as his
girl-wife....  Marriage frequently turns cynics into sentimentalists.
(The converse can be well ignored.)

"I know," he cried suddenly.

"I felt sure you would," she said.  It was just these remarks that made
her such an excellent companion.  "Who is it then?"

"Old Boyd--old Kenneth Boyd.  He's just the very man you'd like.  One
feels so awfully at home with him, he's restful you know;
old-friend-in-five-minutes sort of fellow.  Oh and," he added, "I
forgot just for the moment!  There is a wife too."

"I think I'm almost sorry," said Helena reflectively.  "I don't think
he sounds the sort of person who'd be much good unless alone.  But I'm
so silly with words.  I never can explain and I expect I'm wrong."

There seemed, at any rate, some wisdom in her cryptic estimate.

The dinner-party was not a success.

Helena was so charming to Kenneth Boyd that Hubert, almost beyond
himself with pride and refraining with difficulty from kissing her when
she was too especially delicious, wondered why on earth he had so long
delayed showing his old friends how sweetly original a little simpleton
he had secured in spite of all their jeers.  Kenneth, over a glass of
port from the local grocer, was absolute enthusiasm and delighted his
host till he turned suddenly and said; "Now own that I was absolutely
right?"  With the wives, however, it was different.  Mrs. Boyd said
afterwards to her husband: "Just the poor little undeveloped fool one
would expect any one so conceited to take as his wife!" whilst Helena
thought her a rude pig, and neither was too subtle in concealing her
opinion.

This instinct of hostility was fatal to any real union between the
households.  Hubert noted with amusement how, at each fresh encounter,
the two wives became more and more affectionately cold, and soon kissed
on meeting.

He turned, with Helena still urging him, to other possibilities.

It was then that he thought of Geoffrey Alison.

"Geoffrey Alison," exclaimed Hubert with far more conviction than about
Kenneth Boyd.  "He really _is_ the man!  Amusing, clever, full of
energy, and too young to be really busy."  This in a condescending way.

"Why, how old is he?" she enquired.  "I want some one, you know, who is
cleverer than me and can tell me things at galleries and places."

He smiled at her.  "Well, I think he could tell you things, he must be
twenty-nine by now.  Besides, I was able once to do him a good turn, he
is a sort of protégé; so he'd be only too glad to take you about and as
you call it, tell you things at galleries and places.  He's pretty good
on art."

The word protégé was rolled upon his tongue; the episode of Geoffrey
Alison had pleased him a good deal; but Helena did not seem reassured.

"Oh, thank you!" she said, girlishly for these days when she had begun
duly to expand as wished.  "If he'd think he was doing it as a great
favour, just to pay you back, I'd rather look at pictures and things by
myself and puzzle out their meaning.  It's only I've begun so late."
She paused for a moment, and then without enthusiasm, almost sulkily;
"What did you do for him?"

Hubert embarked on it with gusto.

"Why, it wasn't really very much.  It was just after my first book came
out, when I was twenty-six or so and he was at the Varsity or
somewhere.  I suppose he read a notice or heard the book was selling or
something.  Anyhow, he wrote me a most charming letter, the first I
ever had from any stranger, congratulating me on my success and asking,
if you please, how I had managed it as he heard I was young and he
wanted to become an author too!  I answered all the usual stuff about
hard work and so on, which I see now he must have thought astounding
twaddle if he really was at Oxford, and told him when he came to Town
I'd like to meet him and perhaps could give him a few introductions.
As a matter of fact," he went on after brief reflection, "I never did
the last because I don't believe in it; but he came round at nights and
talked to me and always said I had encouraged him a lot just when a
little bucking-up was needed."

"And did he?" was Helena's sole comment.

Hubert at times could not follow her mind, fledgeling though it was, in
all its flights.  "Did he what, dear?"

"Why, did he become an author?" answered Helena, with that impatient
tolerance which women keep for these occasions.

"Oh no," he said, vaguely annoyed, now, that he had not guessed it.
"Rather not!  He's an artist now.  Not terribly successful, you know,
but getting along.  I don't think you would care much for his pictures,
though."

Secretly, within his mind he reconstructed Alison, remembering now some
not too pleasant drawings that he had brought along one night;
wondering if he had mentioned him too soon.  But he saw only a keen,
harmless youth of the artistic type; a white man, certainly, who, even
if he had a morbid side, would never show it to a girl--or to his
benefactor's wife.

Yes, it was excellent.  He had feared sometimes that she must be lonely
in the mornings or from five to seven, and Alison, he knew, was of the
work-when-I-feel-in-the-mood brigade (yes, it had certainly been
Oxford), for he had finally been forced to tell him he was absolutely
never free till after dinner-time.

He was the very man indeed.  He spent his days in galleries, museums,
theatres; wanted not only something new, like the Athenians, but every
blessed new thing going; and if a heretic therefore on Art, was full of
knowledge and when he cared to, could be very nice.

Helena thought him very nice indeed.

Of course he was ever so much cleverer than she was; she need not have
feared that; and yet he did not seem to mind how elementary the thing
was that she wished to see.  He came with her and would explain it all.
And he was nearly always free.  Hubert had said that he was too young
to be busy, and yet she felt slightly puzzled.  If Geoffrey Alison
could be so nice to friends, of whom he must have several, it did seem
odd that Hubert never could afford a morning for his wife, when he had
only one!  But maybe Mr. Alison had not got many friends as yet or
wasn't as nice to them all?

At any rate life up at Hampstead was far less boring now.  Sometimes on
days when there was not much house-keeping to do, they would go by tube
or 'bus to Trafalgar Square and spend long hours in the National
Gallery or twenty minutes in the Tate to see the Watts room and three
of the statues.  At other times they would just ramble on the Heath,
and prim Mrs. Herbertson, the vicar's wife, amused Helena one day
enormously by thinking Mr. Alison was Hubert.

"Oh, I'm so sorry, dear Mrs. Brett!" she exclaimed, when Helena
laughingly told her the mistake; "but seeing you two about upon the
Heath so often in the mornings, I quite thought----!  You must forgive
my stupidity, please?"  And she smiled a false smile.

Helena thought this delicious, considering that Hugh was tall and broad
and dark and looked like a celebrity at once, whilst Mr. Alison was
rather short and slim, not one half so good-looking--funny-looking,
somehow, even when quite serious--with fair hair always a wee bit too
long!

"Won't Hugh be convulsed?" she asked.

"I don't think I should tell him," he said, to her absolute surprise.

"But why on earth not?" she enquired.

He would not tell her.  In other things he was so kind; unlike her
husband, he would try to fill her gaps in education; but here he was
quite firm.  He only let her force him to say that Hubert was a
splendid fellow but a curious sort of devil--which she had learnt
already, although she did not think that Mr. Alison should say so.  He
added that you never knew.  And finally she gave it up, quite angry.

But she said nothing to her husband and Mrs. Herbertson might easily
have made the same mistake again, except that she learnt Hubert was not
a church-goer--an atheist, she called him--and cut Helena entirely.
This left the young couple free, without social remorse, to make the
most wonderful excursions on Hubert's one free day.  All Sunday; the
afternoon walk; meal-times; after dinner--such was what Hubert gave
her, and for the rest, always half-conscious of his selfishness, he
felt delighted to think whilst working that Helena would not be bored.
She was so busy, dear little simpleton, with this chimæra of her
education!

It was Geoffrey Alison who first took her to causeries and lectures
(she learnt almost at once to recognise a causerie, because the seats
cost more), which took place at the Institute, conveniently after tea.
Surprisingly good men came down--or up?--to speak, and spoke on a
variety of subjects.  Helena, always too nervous to air her knowledge
before Hubert who was so clever and looked upon her (she knew) as a
child, gradually began to juggle chaotically in her brain with such
terms as Ethics, Syndicalism, Molecules, Collectivism, and Eugenics.
It was all most difficult, she told herself, but frightfully worth
while.

"Odd of her, this thirst for culture, isn't it?" said Hubert smilingly
to Kenneth Boyd, on one of their rare meetings away from the hostile
wives; "but it's quite harmless and it keeps them quiet."

Kenneth Boyd spoke gloomily.  "Not always," he said.  Perhaps he knew
more of Woman, even though he never wrote about her.  "Sometimes it has
the opposite effect."

"Oh, I know what you mean," Hubert replied, not caring to be
patronised; "but Helena is not that sort.  She doesn't want the Vote.
She's such a charming little innocent," and he laughed, half love but
half pity.

"Really?" said the enigmatic Boyd.  His thoughts had taken a far ampler
sweep, and he spoke almost darkly.

Hubert did not answer.  He was still thinking of the Vote.  Most men
persistently whittle down Woman's whole platform to a mere splinter
convenient for smashing.

"Why," he elaborated, "if she were given it, she wouldn't know what she
had got to do with it."




CHAPTER VII

THE CULT OF USELESSNESS

Helena certainly had small ambition towards the life political, even as
anything no more exalted than a latch-key voter.  She had been
compelled to read politics in Devonshire but like a schoolboy who is
forced to chapel, found it very dull, and took another course at the
first opportunity.  She could not think, she said, to Hubert's joy, how
grown men even took the trouble of electing members who had no
influence over their own party and spent most of the time in childishly
hindering the other.

She did, however, wish to gain her self-respect.

She met, now, people vastly cleverer than those who had made her feel
ignorant at home, so that her growing knowledge in no way kept pace
with her aspirations.  Those old vague yearnings for something which
she used to call Being Herself were stronger now and in a form more
definite.  She had learnt, in the first year of her married life, all
that a woman could learn about keeping house, but she still felt a
fool.  She knew that this was not enough for her, whatever it might be
for others.  She still loved to hear Hubert talking when he embarked on
Art or some really big subject; but she wished to do more than listen.

And she was learning, too.

Those who give their time to that most wonderful and noblest of all
trades, the making of a man, have lately come by the belief that
children have been taught quite wrongly.  They have been stuffed with
knowledge before their bodies were grown to receive it.  A deluge of
facts has been poured upon them, seated at their little desks, and most
of it has gone out through the open window into God's fresh air, where
they ought to have been themselves.  They have almost burst with
learning--and never learnt to learn.  They have known all Euclid at
thirteen: forgotten everything by thirty-one.  They have been
specialists at seventeen and city clerks at twenty-three.

Mrs. Hallam, that crusted theorist and advocate of the old way,
unconsciously had done a curiously modern thing.  She had kept her
daughter back, given her a healthy body, a mind anxious to expand and
able.  Now, at twenty-two, Helena began to specialise--in learning and
in life.  She had been kept back: now she leapt forward the better.

Contemptible enough perhaps to a superior eye, the salad of quite
disconnected lectures, random talks with a young artist-friend, and
pencilled passages from Mudie books, that formed this home curriculum;
but as in health, contentment, as with life itself, the will to be is
almost everything, and Helena was quite resolved to learn.

Her sole worry, in all the excitement of this onward surge into a
fuller life whose endless spaces thrilled and terrified, was that her
husband would not bear her company.  Oh, he was much too clever.  She
knew that.  She never blamed him.  He had no need for all her causeries
and things.  She would be dull to argue with; and yet----

Yet it is only human, only feminine, when one has got a clever husband
and is adventuring on the long road of Art, to wish that he should take
one's hand.

And she was proud of him.

Her simple mind had not yet probed the inwardness of Mrs. Herbertson's
"mistake."  It did not seem peculiar to her that Mr. Alison should be
seen always, and he only, as her companion at the Institute.  It merely
was that she wished it might sometimes have been Hubert.  She longed to
hear his views on all of it, and it would be nice, too, to show him.
It looked so odd that he would never come, when quite old-looking women
brought husbands triumphantly along!

At length, when fifteen months of lectures gave her a new confidence,
she tackled him point-blank one afternoon while they were walking on
the Heath.

He looked at her reproachfully, as though he were a master who had just
been asked for a half-holiday.

"My dear girl," he said, "is that quite logical?"

She knew at once that hope was dead.  It always was when logic once
appeared.  She never had a chance.

"I don't know why not," she said gaily, for nowadays she did not go
back to her kennel quite so easily.  They had been married for two
years.

Hubert was forced to put the thing in words.

"Well you see, my dear," he started, slowly, "I dare say other husbands
have got their work finished by six o'clock.  In fact"--and he
brightened visibly--"that is really why they fixed that hour, I dare
say.  City men are back.  But it's my best work-hour, you know."

"_Is_ it?" laughed Helena, and looked at him.  Then, as he did not seem
to see the joke, "The _morning_ is, you know, if I ask you to come out
shopping.  I'm afraid, Hugh, you're just a little naughty!"  And she
shook her finger.

"No," he said shortly, still not very much amused, for once, at her
nice childish ways.  "They _both_ are....  It's not much for a man to
work, just two short goes at it, and I simply can't spare the time,
however much I'd like to.  I mustn't go out between tea and dinner when
I'm on a book."

"You used to, though," persisted Helena, "in Devonshire."

It is a rash wife who recalls to her husband the days of single life.

"Very likely," he answered impatiently; "but we weren't married then.
I can't afford it now."

The rash wife had it, full between the eyes; a brutal blow provoked by
her incaution; and she reeled.

"Can't afford it, Hugh?" she repeated, with a vague sense of being
accused.  "Why, do I cost so much?  Do I cost more than Ruth?"

He had not looked for anything quite as direct as that.  He had blurted
it out and now, as often, felt ashamed.  He laughed and said in a much
kinder tone:

"Don't you worry your dear head about things like that.  We shall be
all right.  You won't find the man in possession by our fireside yet,
when you come home from market!"

Now it was her turn not to be amused.  "No, but tell me," she said.
"I'd much rather know.  Are we honestly hard up?"

"What a practical little thing it's getting," he said, patting her on
the back as they strode onward, always heralded by the long white dog
with its straight tail, as proud as a drum-major.  "Well, if you really
want to know," he went on, "we are and have been, but we shan't be.
Listen!"  He turned about and about, his finger to his mouth, upon the
empty spaces, clearly once more in the best of spirits.  "Never tell a
soul--and least of all the High-Art Alison--but I am doing a
pot-boiler!"

"What, something worse than you need?" she blurted out in her
astonishment.

He laughed at that.  "Yes, if you put it so!  Anyhow, something to make
money."

"But won't the critics hate that?" she asked seriously.

Hubert Brett, for a man who had been almost too kindly reviewed, was
always very hard on critics.

"Now listen," he said, "and I'll tell you something.  The public has a
natural suspicion of literary criticism.  It only reads the stuff to
see what to avoid.  If it sees some book is called sincere,
painstaking, artistic, a masterpiece, or anything like that, it passes
on until it comes to something labelled crude and elementary.  Then it
gets out its library list.  Think of the two best-selling novelists
to-day, and then think what the critics say of them!  They are a
journalistic joke.  Yes, the more the dear critics hurl abuse, the more
the darling public rushes out to Boot's.  I'm sick of good reviews and
rotten sales.  I'm not doing it because I married you, not I; but I
want columns of abuse and half a million copies!"

She loathed it, always, when he talked like this.  She never knew quite
what he meant.  She hoped he was not really writing a pot-boiler.

"No, but honestly," she said, "why are things worse than in the old
days?  Your books sell just as well.  Do tell me or I shall ask Ruth."

"Well," he said, but this time without rancour, merely telling her what
she had asked, "you see a house, even a hen-run like ours, always costs
ever so much more than rooms--rates and things like servants, don't you
see--and then Ruth used to make a bit with curious bazaar stuff all
gummed on to tins."

It was a mere backwash of his thought, as he drew the question out to a
solution--nothing more.  He never thought of a comparison.  Why, if the
thing had ever come to that, Helena had her allowance....

But it went home to her, whose early days had bred a diffidence to die
only with the years.  Ruth had helped him, then!

"I wish _I_ could do something," she said.  "I feel so useless!" She
had forgotten her bold attack with which this dialogue had started, and
her whole mind was filled now with its self-reproach.

Hubert felt a sudden shame.  The words threw back his memory to those
first hours in London when the vast City crowd had made her say; "It
makes me feel so useless!"  Dear little girl, what happy, jolly days
she had brought to his life since then!  And yet she thought that she
was useless....

She seemed so upset.  His one idea was consolation.  She must not think
he longed for Ruth again, in even one respect!

Perhaps at a less flustered time he might have thought of all that she
did in the house; those charming little meals, hot always at however
variable times; the pretty bowls of flowers; everything so
dainty--green and white--so different from the grimy lodgings.

But now he did not think of that.  He took her arm instinctively in his
and spoke what came into his mind.

"Dear little girlie," he said kindly, "I love you to be useless."

But she was not consoled.




CHAPTER VIII

A SCENE IN THE HOME

Hubert Brett could never quite escape from business; he analysed
himself too much.  His action sprung from impulse, education, ancestry,
whatever source philosophers may choose to say, but it was followed by
a sequel due to his own introspection.  He tended in this way to set up
something like a chain--a sequence of states which might almost be
expected after any given act.

He might have owned, found in a candid vein, that selfishness was his
besetting fault.  It had been so--this would be his excuse, if he
indeed admitted what certainly he knew--it had been so from birth; at
any rate since he recalled himself an only son and younger than his
only sister, pampered and indulged so far as even a small child could
wish.  He always _had_ got what he wanted.  Hence naturally sprang a
sort of self-centredom, a tendency to think first of what _he_ desired,
something which, well, hang it all, no, it wasn't selfishness, but
merely that self-confidence which all men who meant to get things done
must first of all possess....

None the less, every now and then (he noticed it more, since Helena had
been with him), he did, he knew, do things no doubt quite justifiable
if one were thinking only of success, efficiency, and so forth; but
rather beastly from the other person's--from Helena's--standpoint.  It
was so easy, when defending your own interests (and otherwise you'd get
no work done ever), to be thoughtless, irritable, mean.

About those lectures or whatever they were of the poor little girl's,
for instance....

Ought he, came the doubt when he was back in his own den at one minute
past five o'clock--ought he to have given in to her for once, if she
was really so immensely keen to take him?  After all there often were
days when he had finished work easily by six o'clock; whole months,
even, between books, when he did no work after tea; but there was such
a thing as System, and though a married man, he was quite bachelor
enough to love this time of solitude with pipe and books.  Helena was
sweet; no man could ever have been luckier about his wife; but he saw
her for much more than one-half the day and all of it on Sundays.

Yes really, he could not see that she had any right to look for more.
Perhaps those City men took their wives to these precious causeries,
but they were ever so much more away.  Oh yes, he saw a lot of her and
however much she might complain, he knew that she was really lucky....

All the same, as he never had and the dear child wanted it, perhaps----?

Whereat Hubert, having worked comfortably around his usual
circle--Selfishness, Remorse, Ample Self-Excuse, and Noble
Expiation--got up, feeling very light of heart, and went back to the
drawing-room.

Helena was startled.  She never thought of tragedies, she had known
none in her well-sheltered days, or she might easily have feared that
there was something wrong.  Never in these two years and more had he
come back, once gone, till dinner-time.  Many modern wives might have
resented such a sudden entry.  Luckily this specimen was in no more
compromising a position than that of eating the last jam sandwich, a
thing she never could resist before Lily came and took away the tea.
She waved it at him without shame.

"Hullo!" she said.  "Why what's brought you back?"

He smiled indulgently.  He liked her to be young.

"Look here, Helena," he said, "I've been feeling I was a bit of a brute
about those causeries of yours.  I could easily spare an evening some
day, if you'd like me to.  Let's see the list and then we'll fix on
one."

Many modern wives, again, might have been tiresome about an amende
honourable indeed but so obviously planned.  Not Helena, however.  She
leapt to get the circular, all thrilled excitement and babbling
gratitude.

Hubert ran a proud finger down the list.  "Hullo," he said in
unflattering surprise.  "They've got some quite good men."

He had always utterly ignored her ventures in self-education.  He did
not, for one thing, approve of them; and he had vaguely thought they
were connected with the parish church, Pleasant Sunday Evenings, and
everything like that.

"I'm so glad you're pleased," she put in, quite without irony.

"That's the one we'll do together," he said, and read out--"'January
29: Art as a Religion.--G. K. Shaw.'  And only ten days off, too!"

It was the best, far, on the list; he would perhaps be called on, as a
local author, to make some remarks; and he might meet the lecturer....

"Oh, but how splendid!" she cried, duly grateful.  "Just the very one I
wanted you to come to.  You really _are_ a dear!  And that's a late one
too, at eight o'clock, because the lecturer objected, so your old work
won't suffer after all!"

She talked of it for days to come, what great fun it would be, till
Hubert felt even more guilty.  He had never realised how much she felt
the fact of his not coming.  He had not ever heard, you see, dear Mrs.
Boyd say: "What!  No husband again?  I don't think you keep him in at
_all_ good order; does she, Kenneth?"--as one who should say, "You have
no power over him, at all!"  He did not guess how lonely she had felt
sometimes when Geoffrey Alison could not escort her.  Still he saw her
great keenness now and told himself he would have gone to these
lectures before--if only he had known they were not University
Extension.

He was distinctly flattered by the way she harped upon this small
concession.  Little things like that had a curious power of making
Hubert Brett well satisfied with life.

She could see that afresh, six mornings later.

He was opening his letters, a process which made breakfast quite a
nervous time for her, because one small reverse--no more than an
unflattering review--upset him so and sometimes ruined his whole
morning's work, which meant he would be silent and depressed at
lunch-time.

To-day, however, having opened first the only letter in an unknown hand
as promising the most adventure, he said with real exhilaration:

"Ah, that's encouraging.  That bucks one up!"

"What, good news, Hugh dear?" she inquired, delighted.

"Yes, the Kit Kat Club has asked me as its guest of honour."

Inwardly she was a little disappointed; she had hoped it would be some
money.

"How excellent!" she said, good wife; and then, "What _is_ the Kit Kat
Club?"

"Why, it's a well-known literary club," he answered, slightly hurt.
"They meet"--he read the card again--"at Lewisham."

"Capital!" she said: not because she had ever heard of Lewisham as a
great literary centre, but because he was so terrifically pleased.
"And when is it to be?"

"Very short notice," he said, looking once more at the invitation.
"This very Tuesday, January 29th.  Lucky we never dine out!"

"But Hugh," she began, oh so disappointed, and then stopped.  She had
told every one--well, Mrs. Boyd--that she was bringing Hugh this
time....

He understood.  "Why, it's the lecture or debate," he said.  "I _am_
sorry."  There clearly was no question which should go.  Then, much
more gently, remembering her keenness: "Never mind, little girl: we'll
find another nice debate.  Let's see the list and we will pick one now."

Treats, of course, are seldom a success the second time.  Helena, now,
did not dash for the list.  In fact Hubert, looking up, saw that great
tears were rolling down her cheeks.

She could have killed herself for shame.  It only proved how difficult
it was to be grown up, if you began too late!

And Hubert was not even touched by it.  The silly action had no
sanction in success.

He got up angrily, without a word, but making it clear that he had
thought her selfish.  He sat on the armchair and took up the
_Spectator_.  This announced that breakfast was now over.

Helena felt that his rebuke was thoroughly deserved.  What must he
think of her, when they took place each week and he had offered to come
to another?  Of course he didn't know about that rude pig, Mrs. Boyd!

"Hugh dear," she said, also getting up, "I am so sorry; I feel such a
beast.  It's only I was disappointed.  Of course my meeting's simply
nothing.  I ought to have been glad about the Kit Kats, and I am."

Some men, after that, would possibly have changed their minds and taken
her to her dear meeting; but to Hubert nothing came before success.

"That's a dear unselfish little wife," he answered soothingly and gave
her a forgiving kiss.  The episode was closed.

"You're sure it is the twenty-ninth of this month?" she therefore
angered him by asking.  Helena could not believe in Fate being so
brutal.

"Well, there's the card," he answered brusquely.

She took it up, filled with an abrupt, unchristian desire to tear it
into fragments.  It had a silly black cat in silhouette upon it and she
_had_ thought he would come at last....

"Why Klub with a K?" she did allow herself to ask.

"Just a literary conceit, I suppose," he answered, trying to control
his voice; and that silenced her, because she had no theories as to
what a literary conceit might be.

But Hubert could not quite allow the matter to rest there.  He felt
that she was thinking he had acted selfishly and he must prove to her
that everything would be all right.  What odd disguises can Remorse
assume!

"You can get Alison to take you," he threw out.  "He's sure to be
going."

"Oh no," answered Helena.  "I told him you were coming.  He'll be
booked.  No, I shan't go at all."

Face Mrs. Boyd exultant?  No, not she.  Afterwards, if needed, some
excuse.  But anyhow not that!  She had said she was bringing Hubert.

"That's silly, my dear."  He did not often call her that.  "Alison will
take you gladly, I know, or if not you can go alone.  You often have
before."

"Yes," she retorted, "but not when I've told every one that you were
taking me.  I have a little pride."

He shut his paper and got up.  He never could bear scenes.

"Just as you like," he said, trying to speak evenly.  "It's your
concern.  I was only thinking of your comfort.  Whatever you do won't
hurt _me_."

      *      *      *      *      *

A man can escape everything except himself; and so it chanced that
Hubert Brett felt a brute twice, repented twice, about one causerie.

He felt it most acutely in his little room.

He very nearly went back to her now, a second time, and said so; but
then he remembered what a nasty scene it had been, about nothing.  Of
course in the old anti-marriage days it had been his pet theory that
every wedded pair inevitably--by force of Nature, which meant every one
to dwell apart--ended in continued rows; but it had seemed so quite
impossible with Helena.  Perhaps it always did!...

So sweet and pliable and ignorant of life she had been--yes, this was a
new Helena and more like the old Ruth!

No, he would not go back.

He would be hanged if he encouraged her.




CHAPTER IX

CINDERELLA

Helena tried not to look as though she minded when Hubert came down,
glorious in evening dress at six o'clock.

"It _is_ an early start," she said cheerfully.

"Yes," he replied; "but that means I shall be home all the earlier.
The dinner begins at seven and I shan't make a long speech--trust
me--so you can expect me back not later than half past ten or eleven at
the very latest."

He just restrained himself from saying once more that he thought her
stupid not to go across to the Institute instead of moping all alone
till then.  Even so his farewell was a little cold for, though he kept
silence, he could not help feeling she had been selfish over the whole
business.  Her air of martyrdom had rubbed some gilt off the occasion's
splendour.

As for Helena, having waved him gaily out of sight, she did not return
and give way to a natural sorrow, as he imagined, typically penitent so
soon as he had parted from her.  She looked, it is true, hard and
thoughtful for a moment.  Then she laughed almost happily.  What did it
matter really?  It would only be one evening alone, one lecture
missed;--and who was Mrs. Boyd?  Why of course any one really nice
would be glad that her husband had been honoured by these beastly Kit
Kats, whoever they might be.

She sat down and wrote a long letter--about everything else in the
world--to her lonely mother, who after all never had any one at all to
dine with her, unless you counted clergymen.

That finished, it was dinner-time and that was fun because she had
ordered or brought in all her pet kickshaws--shrimps, dough-nuts and so
forth--which Hubert always vetoed, describing them expansively as dirty
feeding.  Men, she decided, got so little out of life; always beef and
cabbages and yesterday to-morrow....

It was really quite a philosophic meal.  She often was alone, for some
big part indeed in every day, but there was something in this first
lonely dinner that made a curious break and gave, as the French say, to
think.  She thought of her old life in Devonshire; she thought of her
ambitions towards self-development when she decided upon marriage; she
thought without pride of herself as she was at present; and she thought
of Hubert.

She had reached the dough-nut course, and also the conclusion that they
were an odd couple but probably most couples were, when the front door
bell sounded, as it always did, through the whole little house.

Helena looked at the clock.  Ten minutes to eight!  No parcel-post.
What could it be, possibly?  Not Hubert back?  She felt a quick shame
of the dough-nut.

It was beneath the table safely before Lily entered.

"Please'm," said the maid, "it's Mr. Alison wants to speak to you."

Helena went out into the hall.  "Hullo," she said, hoping he had not
expected dinner.  "Have you been to the Institute?  What was it like?"

"Been," he laughed.  "No!  It's only ten to eight.  This is an
eight-o'clocker, you know.  G. K. S. will never stand things at the
ordinary time!"

This was a blow.  Helena, not letting herself think of all that she was
missing, had yet fancied that it was safely over.  And it had not even
begun...  "Oh," was all that she said.

"I went along," Geoffrey Alison proceeded quickly, as though every
instant counted, "because I am a steward so had to be early, and asked
just out of curiosity where you were sitting.  They said, so to speak,
you weren't!  I knew you both intended coming so I ran across.  I've
got two tickets just returned, so if----"

"How very kind of you," said Helena, feeling that she could almost slay
him; "but it wasn't that we couldn't get in.  Hubert at the last moment
found that he wasn't free, so we sent our seats back.  He suddenly
remembered he was dining out."  She tried to make it sound as though
there had not been a tiff.

"Dining out?" repeated Geoffrey Alison, "Well then, you're free to come
along like all the other ones?"

"Oh no, thank you; I don't think I will," said Helena.  She had not
forgotten about Mrs. Boyd.

"But you simply _must_," replied the other, pulling out his watch.
"They'll be beginning if we don't make haste.  You couldn't miss this
possibly; it's far the best of the whole series.  Old Dr. Kenyon, too,
thinks art is a disease and intends asking questions.  It will be
tremendous.  Come along or you will make us late."

"But I'm not tidy or anything," said Helena.  Definite objections are
the first steep steps down from refusal to complaisance.

He recognised this.  "So much the better," he cried in prompt triumph.
"Unprepared things are always the best sport.  You don't need wraps;
it's like a summer night and you look very smart.  Come on!  Your
husband won't object.  It will be simply grand.  We'll have a picnic
causerie!"

Helena was swept away.  Bother Mrs. Boyd and every one!  It really
would be fun and she would be so bored at home.  Hubert had told her
she should go.  Besides--did she feel dimly, ever so little even, that
she was somehow getting even with him?  Let us pass quickly on, with
all the charity that we can muster....

The Institute was packed.  This was clearly a great night.

Helena, directly she entered the room, full of an excitement that had
almost the sensation of magnetic waves, was glad that she had come.
And as they found their seats, the chairman and the speaker entered.

That evening, as Mr. Alison had promised, was the jolliest of the whole
of the series.  She even enjoyed merely looking at this G. K. Shaw.

He was ever such a big man, who swelled genially outward and then ended
unexpectedly in quite a savage beard.  He looked so comfortable and
friendly that she felt certain all the nice things he meant to say (you
could tell from his eyes) got somehow twisted all wrong in that horrid
beard.

Certainly, to judge by mere words, there was a lot with which she could
not sympathise and some she could not understand.  If only Hubert had
been free!

He said, for instance, that conventional Religion was man's excuse to
the Almighty: that faith was the power of believing what we could not
prove untrue: and that churches should possibly be built, because of
unemployment, but left empty for the glory of their Maker.  All this
puzzled her, and Mr. Alison would only chuckle, while most others
grunted.  Then the lecturer got round to Art and said that life was the
Creator's masterpiece.  He roughly defined Art as that which never
found its way to paper.  He admitted the existence of a body of
literature and paintings.  He did not for a moment wish to conceal the
existence of the Royal Academy.  One corn-crake, however, did not cause
a winter: and he wished to-night to speak only about Art.  The modern
out-look was parochial and men failed to see even the parish for
looking at the clergymen.  An Artist had no fatherland.  He had the key
of the World: for paint was thicker than blood.  No two nations had
ever agreed on armaments or treaties: but all admitted that Farnese was
greater than Phil May.  The worry with the world to-day was not that it
was old: it was a million years too young.  No man troubled with the
future, because he knew that it must some day be the past.  Religion
hinted at the future: Art alone interpreted the present.  Five thousand
years had thrown mud at the workman: Brangwyn proved him the sole
dignified thing left in a dead-level age.  For centuries they had
destroyed old ruined tenements, and Bone had shown them to be the only
kind that ought to be allowed.  Art dealt with the beautiful and live;
the Church with what was gloomy and decayed.  You could not make people
wicked by Act of Parliament; the plain man was an artist when he shaved
his face.  Art was to the English what death had been to the Egyptians,
but London was full of things that no one ever spoke about.  There was,
for instance, the Imperial Institute.  It was better to be beautiful
than dead.  Some of those he met were neither.  He wished that they
were both.  He should be glad if any one would raise objections, for
their mutual advantage.  Every one was right and nobody was ever wrong.

There had been ever so much more than that, she knew; but this was all
she could recall when finally he took his seat, and now, already, she
was not altogether sure how it had been connected.  She was not by any
means convinced but she was tremendously encouraged.  New vistas of an
unsuspected length and freshness opened out from a drab world, whilst
the fat, bearded man was speaking.  Sometimes she supposed he must be
very funny?

"Capital, capital," murmured Mr. Alison, and only that.  He usually had
such a lot to say, too!  She was disappointed.

But now grimly and deliberately there uprose an elderly man of stern
broad face and a respectable frock-coat.  He must apologise for letting
his heavy periods drop on the top of the last speaker's brilliant
flippancies, but truth, he regretted to say, was truth.

"That's old Kenyon," her neighbour whispered gleefully.

The doctor, having said so much of calm preface as due to a visitor,
suddenly blazed out into a quicker time and a more violent mood.  So
far, he said, from Art being a religion, it was a disease.
(Sensation.)  He proved this at some length, largely in the dead
languages, with extracts read from small pamphlets which (he announced)
he had the honour to have contributed to various of the famous
Monthlies.

The soldier-type, he argued, was the most essentially male, 'and it was
furthest-moved from the artistic.  He went so far, in conclusion, as to
say that literary creation was only possible to a hybrid creature
half-male and half-female, of whichever sex.

The general feeling was that this was rude to Mr. G. K. Shaw.

The famous author rose, however, blandly and swung his body round to
Dr. Kenyon.

"Now there'll be some fun," said Geoffrey Alison.

"I consider," said Mr. G. K. Shaw quite gravely, holding his beard
steady, "that the last speaker's mongrel theory of literature is
plausible and valuable.  I am, however, puzzled as to how he accounts
for his own admirable pamphlets?"

Which certainly was fun and everybody laughed, to the annoyance of old
Dr. Kenyon, who was thenceforth nicknamed "Mongrel" and shortly after
moved to Wimbledon.

But beyond all this, Helena found a vague excitement in the evening.
It was not like those other causeries at six o'clock; she wished they
always could take place at eight.  The mere fact, too, of having come
so on the moment's spur lent quite a new attraction.  As Geoffrey
Alison had hinted, picnics are more romantic than a dinner-party and
this had bulked into almost an adventure.

He saw her home.  The speeches had been long and it was half-past ten
already, but all was darkness in the little house.

Helena had quite a feeling of nervousness at the idea of switching on
light after light, alone.  "Come along in," she said simply.
"Hubert'll be here in half a moment.  Then he'll give you a drink, and
we will all exchange experiences!"  All rancour had gone; yet--well,
she would rather like to show Hugh that his absence didn't mean she
merely sat and cried!  Women _are_ human--and women.

"No, I don't think I will, thanks very much," he said.

His face and tone puzzled her.  "Don't say _you_'re busy, now!" she
cried.  "It's a regular disease."

"Oh no, I never work at night," he answered.  "Artists can't very well.
That is the one advantage of our job!"

"Well don't be tiresome then, and come on in," she said, holding the
door open.  "Hugh will be furious if he knows you're just gone.  So
don't be stupid.  _I_ was tame, just now!"

"If you really mean it," he replied almost solemnly and entered.

"Of course I do," she laughed.  "Should I invite you, otherwise?  How
curious you are!  Come into the dining-room and then when Hugh comes,
he can give you--Oh no, let's come into here!"  She hastily pointed to
the drawing-room.

Geoffrey Alison went in, puzzled, thinking.

He did not know, and she had only just remembered, about that dough-bun.




CHAPTER X

HONOUR

Hubert meanwhile was enjoying quite another sort of artistic evening.
On first arrival, indeed, at the Club (which proved to meet in a Hotel
Coffee Room), he found himself wondering whether he might not have been
wiser in keeping to the old arrangement.  The Lewisham Kit Kats, on
entry to their circle, did not promise so much intellectual reward as
G. K. Shaw and the scorned Institute.  They had not the exotic charm of
their great prototype.

He had imagined, always, a band of young enthusiasts in Literature,
fresh maybe from the 'Varsity, who would be glad to hear what he had
got to say and welcome him to their--it might be--weekly dinner.  But
here were no evening suits except his own, of which he grew now only
too aware.  The common dress was dark suit, bow-tie, and moustache; or
with the women--for it was "mixed"--what he imagined would be blouse
and skirt.  They were a frowsy-looking lot, he told himself; horribly
genial; and he more than suspected them of being Bohemian.  There was a
tortured look of gladness upon every face.  They bowed elaborately and
shook hands with fervour, until the whole room buzzed with brotherly
salutes.  And Hubert, in his dress-suit, stood among them.  One by one
the members were brought up and all of them shook hands.  Not one among
the sixty who failed to be very proud to meet him.  Hubert sighed for
Helena and G. K. Shaw, finding his only means of consolation in
elaborating it as a good story.  He wished that he could say with truth
that they had not an _h_ among them, but this was not so.  He would
have liked them better, he decided, if that had been true.  They were
snobs in their own way, he felt confident, and their gentility was an
affair of effort.  They were that trying set, the in-betweens....

It was with genuine relief he heard that dinner was now served, and in
they trooped: he first with his allotted woman; the rest, all
apologetic smiles, falling in anyhow behind.  They settled at the
tables in a hungry silence.  Hubert could see the waiters smiling at
his evening dress,--or thought he could, which was equally unpleasant.
He turned hurriedly to his neighbour, whose name he had failed to catch
in his agitation.  He only remembered the friendly President murmuring
in his ear: "Her brother is a book-reviewer," as though that gave her a
niche all apart.

"How often do you have these dinners?" he decided to begin.

She aimed a toothy smile straight at him.  Hubert had never noticed how
unusually fat she was before, and tried hard not to seem as though he
had observed it now.  He looked doggedly at her light yellow hair, and
then looked down again when he saw that it was not real.

"I'm not a Kit Kat, you know, Mr. Hubert Brett," she answered coyly.
"They meet every Tuesday, but we ladies are only asked when there is
some special attraction, so you see you should feel very honoured!  I
find it most interesting" (she laid the accent upon the third
syllable), "because you see, my brother is a book reviewer, so I
naturally take a special interest."

"Naturally," answered Hubert.

"We always say," she went on, very animated, "just for a joke, you
know, only among ourselves, that the Kit Kats have a far gayer time
when we ladies are not admitted: we see them on their best behaviour!"

"Yes?" Hubert said absently, forgetting to smile or to live up in any
way to this pet joke amongst the ladies.  He was thinking.  "What does
your brother review for?" he enquired as a result.

The big lady looked on him a little sternly, not at all sure whether he
had not intended to be rude.  He had been very short with her
pleasantry, and now was he doubting about Harold?  He ought to know the
name.

"For several books," she said with dignity, and turned to the man on
her other side, who might not be a famous author but was the Mayor's
cousin and far less stuck-up.

Hubert knew that he had failed, and his other neighbour proved
unhappily to be deaf on the near side.  He spent the rest of a long and
essentially British meal in trying to appease the critic's sister.  It
was all rather difficult, and he was glad now that he had told the
President he must leave early, as his wife was nervous and he had a
long way to go.  He could escape a little before half-past nine and
they would be much happier without him.  He wished now that he had
refused the whole thing.  Still, it _was_ something to be chosen as the
guest of honour....

And, indeed, when all the meal had gone except its odour and the
President had facetiously announced that the ladies might now smoke, it
proved to be a very big thing indeed to be the Kit Kats' guest of
honour.

Even Hubert Brett's tried capacity for absorbing flattery was strained
when Mr. President, as everybody called him always, spoke minute after
minute in praise of his books: recalling their names (from a list
propped up on his cigar-tray), although he was sure Kit Kats would not
need reminding.  These sterling merits which he had just enumerated had
won, he said, for Hubert Brett, if he might drop the Mr. in Art's
fellowship (applause), a big following in Lewisham, and to-night's
event, he felt confident, would render it yet bigger.  Frankly, as
President, when he thought of this fixture he had felt pleased.
(Applause.)  Of the distinguished novelist's affability in acceding to
their desire in spite of the many calls upon his time and recent
marriage (laughter), he intended to say nothing.  (Some applause.)  He
here read out, he confessed with a certain pride, the names of
distinguished authors who had so acceded formerly, and Hubert was half
disappointed yet half flattered to find himself able to agree with the
President's remark that none of them was so popular or well-known an
author as their guest to-night.  "He has told me," slyly concluded the
orator, "that the trains home are bad and that his wife is sitting up
for him.  (Laughter.)  Those of us who are married men will
understand."  (Loud laughter and a high-voiced "Shame," then female
tittering.)  "I only pull aside the veil in this way so as to let you
realise why I draw my remarks short to-night and call upon our guest of
honour, Hubert Brett, for the pleasure of a few words upon the
literature of to-day, in which he plays so considerable a part."

Enormous applause greeted this conclusion and to it was added the
clapping of white gloves (for all the ladies wore them), as Hubert rose
and stood behind his chair.  Even the lady whose brother reviewed,
possibly melted by hearing that her neighbour was a genius to whom much
always is forgiven, smacked him playfully on the back as he got up to
speak.

He was not a good speaker and prudently had written out the headings of
his speech and a few epigrams that might pass as impromptu after wine.
There had not, unluckily, been any wine and all the early epigrams
passed quite unnoticed.  A speech devised for 'Varsity enthusiasts was
not of the true Kit Kat bouquet.

Hubert had so far got the instincts of an orator that he could realise
this fact.  The chilly aspect of his listeners told him that he had not
gripped them; a swift ranging back to the last speech supplied the
cause.  He was not broad enough in his effects.  They did not care for
theories on writing; they wanted something personal.  They wanted
reminiscences.  Their welcome, when he first got up, had shown they
took him seriously.  Nobody of his own set was there!  What harm?

Hubert Brett's speech (for no one ever used the Mr. of him afterwards)
is still remembered as the most enjoyable of all the Kit Kats ever
heard.  Such interesting people had he met and known, known well; such
vivid lights he threw upon the full life of a famous literary man.

No single member who got up to join in the discussion afterwards but
started with an eulogy of their guest's work and speech.

Hubert was very pleased.  He had warmed to the Kit Kat manner.  He
should not tell it as a comic story; it would not be fair.  After all,
perhaps they were not an artistic set, but then not everybody could
belong to that, and they were very genial.  You only had to get to know
them.  They were the Public anyhow, the class for whom one wrote, and
possibly they might have influence, some few of them.  This woman next
door, now so affable, had got a brother who reviewed for several
papers.  All of this must help.  It was absurd to be exclusive when one
came to Art.  He looked upon this evening as one of the most
encouraging in his whole life.  Wouldn't Helena be pleased to hear it
all?

And that reminded him.

With a hot shame he drew out his watch.

His speech had been long and one of many after a full dinner.  It was
very nearly half-past ten and a long journey home....

Full of guilt, he pulled himself together, to make his excuses.  There
was a gap now.  No one seemed to volunteer as speaker.  He----

But Mr. President was on his feet.  He must not interrupt.

"Gentlemen--_and_ Ladies!" said the President amid appreciative
laughter, "all the volunteers now being exhausted, I shall proceed in
accordance with Kit Kat tradition to call out the reserve and ask them
to speak, whether they wish it or no.  And the first gentleman I think
we all feel we should like to hear speak is our old valued friend and
excellent critic, Mr. Henry Jenks."

This met with such general applause that Hubert felt it would be
ridiculous to get up now.  It also would be rude and pointed.  Besides,
"critic"--did he mean professional?  It might be silly to offend him.
After all, these people who were asked to speak would surely be better,
their estimate of his work more worth while, than those who simply
wanted to hear their own voice?

Helena wouldn't mind.  She was so easy-going, bless her.  She would
love to hear.

To the flattered relief of a vigilant President, who had observed the
guest of honour's restless movement, Hubert settled once more in his
chair.

He would stay ... just a little.




CHAPTER XI

PINK PAPERS AND ST. ANTHONY

It is both easy and comforting to divide men simply into opposites.
Honest, dishonest; truthful, lying; clean, dirty;--what a lot of worry
it undoubtedly prevents.  You trust one person all the way, another
nowhere; you tell your secrets to the first and to the second nothing;
it is so simple that few people can resist it, when they come to life.
And it is good enough for working purposes.

But in reality it is not so.  A man all white or all black is but
rarely met: the last is soon removed, the first impossible for common
use.  Man was devised from a more subtle palette; and if in all the
millions of faces no two are alike, that is yet truer, said about the
heart.  The man you trust so freely has his see-saw moments, like
anybody else, and if as a rule he lands the right end down, it may have
been your very confidence that lent him weight.  It is the same with
all.  They must be entered for convenience beneath the colour which
they most display, but every one of them is a true moral rainbow and
much more.  Take it all in all, we humans are the most mixed thing that
any one has ever yet invented: the reason why some scorn all other
hobbies or amusements, so long as there is Man.

Geoffrey Alison was an especially odd mixture--all of course kept
rigidly inside.  To the mere eye he was, like most, quite simple,
almost to the point of dulness.  Oh yes; I see, yes; the artistic type;
a gentleman though; trustworthy but slack; quite modest although jolly
clever; pretty much of a white man...  But inwardly he was a thing to
watch because his types conflicted, and that ends with fireworks.

He joined the artist's soul--a real love for the beautiful and
noble--to what perhaps may be most easily described as a pink-paper
mind.  He could sit and gaze happily for hours at a Corregio,
forgetting the plush benches and the noisy tourists, utterly absorbed;
he found a joy that was almost physical in a sudden landscape or the
moon which breaks loose from its clouds and gleams on a rough sea; he
would watch with a smile of pleasure the way of a woman with her child
or a child with its toy; he shrank with loathing from all that was
ugly, sordid--the sight of needless misery or the sound of a woman's
oath; and yet--and yet he could not rid himself of the idea that there
was something palpitating, wicked, spicy, about a shop-girl who held up
her skirt to cross a muddy road.  There was a thrill for him each time
that he passed a stage-door.  Garters--champagne (always known as
fizz)--corsets--chorus girls--these all held for him a brimming measure
of romance.  He was convinced that there was something specially
cryptic and alluring about bar-maids, though he would never enter bars
as he did not like other people's glasses.  Paris to him stood for a
riot of continued orgies shaming a white dawn.  He was of those who for
peculiar reasons can thoroughly enjoy a really English ballet.  The
thought of studios and models had half consciously affected the choice
of his career; and if he now knew that to be illusion, so far as his
experiences went, he still liked--well, one half of him--to read the
old exciting fairy-tales.  Perhaps they happened somewhere, still.

At times, when he was on a holiday or anywhere except at his own
news-shop, he would buy, half-ashamed and furtive, those strange,
elemental papers whose main task it is to tickle the broad tastes of
City youths or Army officers.  And he thoroughly enjoyed them--until
afterwards.

Army men, in fact, who had glared at him all through a long
dinner-party, often revised their estimate when coffee had come in and
their wives departed; if, be it understood, the conversation drifted
into a right channel.  On the way home, should their wives say; "I
liked that Mr. Alison, so clever!" they would reply: "M'yes?  Rather an
affected ass, my dear: I can't stand those artistic johnnies.  Still,
he came out a bit over the wine and showed he _had_ got something in
him.  Not a bad fellow I dare say; bit of a sportsman possibly--in
spite of his long hair.  But I'm not sure we want to have him calling?"
Which only shows how useful it may be for any man to have two sides.
You never can please all the world with one!

Of course the one in question was entirely abstract.  Geoffrey Alison
would never have even dreamt of doing all the things he liked to read
on paper.  It would perhaps have been more healthy if he had; but no,
he realised, himself, that it was only an idea.

It was an idea, too, that he shared with no one.  His friends--artists
and authors--somehow were not amused by anything of that sort, although
the papers he enjoyed were read by millions.  It was curious!  He kept
it to himself, and that was bad as well.  To Hubert he had raised the
curtain for one moment, with those sketches of his own, but the
audience had not seemed keen for more.  And as for Helena--well,
inwardly Geoffrey Alison was an odd mixture; but he remained a
gentleman outside.

All the same, to-night was trying him a little hard.

Helena's friendliness had thrilled him from the day they met.  He had
never met a woman--anyhow not young and pretty--who had taken to him
like that from the first.  He never had regarded himself as a lady's
man; he was too small and timid; yet she had seemed to find nothing
wrong with him.  She had adopted him as her guide and philosopher in
art; gone about with him more, almost, than with that absurdly busy
fellow Brett; until the cattish vicar's wife----!

And now----!

Of course he knew that she was just a girl, and jolly innocent and all
that sort of thing (Brett liked to keep her back), but even so, any one
surely would admit that it was a little bit exciting and peculiar.  The
way she asked him in; and then he could not make out why she changed
her mind about the dining-room and came into the drawing-room where she
sat down upon the sofa and looked simply ripping.  It was all very odd!

Of course she was innocent and jolly, but he believed that she was fond
of him and some day he would love--when they were all alone like
this--if only half in fun--to give her just one kiss.  She surely
couldn't mind?  It would be splendid and exciting.  (It may be added
that Geoffrey Alison thought more of its excitement than its splendour.)

The very idea made being with her like this so difficult and trying.
He could not think of anything to say.  It all sounded wrong.

Even Helena noticed, at last.

"How dull you are to-night!" she said peevishly, for they were old
friends and she never troubled to sort out her words.  "I believe you
_did_ want to work or else had something else to do."

"Of course not," he protested, feeling horribly wronged in the
circumstances.  "This is awfully jolly."  Why couldn't he be natural?

Helena was not so confident about the jollity.  "Hugh _must_ be here
soon," she remarked rather wearily.

"Why do you call him Hugh?" he asked, jumping at a topic.  "Surely
that's not really short for Hubert?  It ought to be Bert!"

"Oh, how dare you?" she asked gaily; she felt that they had got back on
to the old easy paths.  "Bert indeed--for him!  I wonder how you----"
and she clapped her hands excitedly.  "Yes," she said, her boredom all
forgotten, "that's it!  I always thought that Mr. Alison was far too
stiff; I've got a name for you."

"For _me_?"  That silly blood was jumping in his brain.

"Yes," she cried.  "Ally!  I shall call you Ally, just like Ally
Sloper!  That's better than Bert."

Ally.  It was not romantic, no; but still----

Gad, what a ripping little girl she was!

He wished to goodness he hadn't ever thought about that kiss.  He could
have been ever so much more amusing, make her like him more, if only he
hadn't got that possibility before him.  And yet ... perhaps it was
worth while.

But Helena had no such abstract thrill to keep her eyes open and it was
well after eleven.  She wished now that Mr. Alison had not come in.
When Hubert got back, they'd sit and have drinks.  She wished that he
would go.  And how she longed to yawn!  If only he would even be
amusing....

"Have you seen my snap-shot album?" she asked.  In their two years of
friendship, it had never come to this before.

"No," he said.  "May I?" feeling very young.  He knew that he was being
entertained.

She leant down wearily to get it from the bookshelfs lower row.  Her
smooth white neck stretched in a rounded slope before him.  By Gad!
His hands moved restlessly towards her.  This was his great chance.
She might not even ever know!

And then--she was so innocent.  Suppose she boxed his ears or anything
like that?  Supposing she told Brett?...

"No, don't worry with it," he said, finding it quite hard to speak.  "I
think I'd better go.  It's too late for snap-shots!  He must have
missed his train."

"He'll be here any moment now," she felt compelled to say.

"I know," he answered meaningly, as though that explained his going.
She did not notice of course, was just puzzled for a moment, but it
gave him another thrill.  As he passed through the hall, with her
beside him, he saw the minute hand was nearer to midnight than to any
other hour; a very dissipated time....

And outside, in the little garden, he drew a long breath, as though to
set free the vanquished evil thoughts.  He felt he had been very good
to-night in face of opportunities for other things.

St. Anthony himself could not have felt much more complacent.




CHAPTER XII

DEVILS

Hubert groped his way homewards along the ill-lit road, filled by a
certain shame but also nearly chuckling to himself.

What a splendid, encouraging night it had been!  Those last and most
important speakers were if anything even more enthusiastic about all
his novels.  It was nice to get into touch with those for whom you
wrote and know that they are pleased.  It took away the great drawback
of a writer's job as compared with the vocalist's or actor's; that you
never heard the clapping.  (He did not, of course, think about the
hisses.)

Wouldn't Helena be glad to hear it all!

He had forgotten by now that there had been any trouble as to this
evening's fixture, remembering only how delighted she was always, bless
her, with his least success.  Imagine, now, if he were going back to
lonely digs--or Ruth!

By this time he had reached the crossroads whence the house is visible,
and now his bubbling pleasure suddenly went flat.  He could see their
bedroom windows from here, and there was no light....  He had told her
not to sit up, certainly, but he had naturally thought that she would
read in bed and keep awake to hear about the evening.  Of course he was
a little late; but still, he thought resentfully, she might----

Then he remembered.

How feminine!  She wished to spite him for deserting her in favour of
the Kit Kats!  She was asleep, or anyhow pretending, and thought to
punish him, like comic-paper husbands, by making him fumble his way
into bed in a considerate darkness!

He smiled at her simplicity.  How like her!  She knew nothing about
anything.  He'd soon show her how childish she had been.  He meant to
turn the light on and bang drawers and then--it really would be rather
comic to see her, like the child she was, pretending to awake.  In this
grim mood of resolution, creditable to a bullied sex, he turned into
his gate and as he moved slowly out into the dark garden from under the
thick ivy arch, was conscious of a male figure not three feet away.

Instantly his trained imagination nimbly leapt from point to point.  He
understood now why there was no light up there; he could fancy the poor
frightened girl listening to a scraping noise; the useless, snoring
servants; possibly a struggle, she was so brave----

God, if anything had happened to her!

In a second flash he had seen, for the first time possibly, how much
she meant to him.  We moan our tragedies and scarcely notice blessings
till they go.

And whilst his brain sped along those twin paths, his arm sprang out
and gripped the fellow by the throat.

"I say, Brett," cried a strangled voice, "it's me."

"Who is it?" asked Hubert.  "Alison?" and he released his hold.

"Yes," said the other, making sure that all his throat was there.
Brett, he ruefully reflected, was one of those big devils and big
devils never knew their strength.  "I've been taking your wife to the
causerie."

"Oh!" answered Hubert.  Perhaps it was excitement only, but he felt of
a sudden as though he could resume his grip with pleasure.  "It must
have been a long affair."

The sneer was obvious.  He never had been jealous about Helena
before--but things were happening to-night.

"Oh," laughed the other apologetically: and Hubert realised what an ass
he was, wondered why he had ever got to know him, "we've been in some
time."

"I see," said Hubert.  "Well, good-night."  He could not trust himself
much longer.  It was so dark, and that grip had been vaguely satisfying
to some primæval side of him....

Geoffrey Alison returned the greeting and slid away with definite
relief.  He had not liked the way that Brett said that "I see."  It was
so obvious he did.  And then about the causerie having been long----!

When he grew cooler, sitting in the tube, he began to wonder nervously
how this would affect his friendship with Helena (he always thought of
her as that), and looked rather doubtfully along the future.  Well, he
should see.  He wouldn't call again until she wrote.

Only one thing was certain.  Her husband suspected him--and he felt
wickeder than ever....

Hubert meanwhile let himself into the dark hall and merely throwing
down his hat, without taking off his coat, strode full of war into the
drawing-room.  Helena had just finished the postponed yawn with some
luxuriance and decided that Mr. Alison must get up very early and do
all his work then, and that made him so dull at night.  She turned
delightedly as the door opened.  Good: Hugh already!

"Helena," he said, storming in, "why did you pretend you weren't going
to the show to-night?"

"What _do_ you mean, Hugh?" she asked, utterly surprised.  "I wasn't."
She hoped that he had not been drinking.  Men, she believed, mostly did
when they got out alone.

"You must think me a fool," he said.  "But I don't intend to have an
argument about it.  I only want to say at once that I think it would be
far better if you saw less of your friend Mr. Alison.  I meant to say
it anyhow.  People are talking."

"But I don't understand," she faltered, almost as a question.

He laughed scornfully.  "I know you're ignorant but you are not a fool,
so don't pretend you are.  Of course married women don't need
chaperons, I know all that, but a mere girl like you and that young ass
and almost midnight--but don't let's go into all that."  He calmed
himself, swallowing his wrath, and said more gently; "I know it's all
right really, dear, don't think I don't, it's only--well, you know what
people say."

"_What_ do they say?" she asked indignantly.

"As you ask," he answered, letting the words out coldly, "I heard one
man telling another at the Golf Club yesterday that Mrs. Herbertson was
saying she had not yet found out whether Alison or I was Mr. Brett, but
thought _he_ was as you saw more of him.  That's a local joke!  It's
jolly, isn't it?"

"_I_ think it's disgusting," she answered oddly calm.  "I shouldn't
ever care what people with that sort of mind think."

"Well _I_ do," he almost shouted at her, "and I want you to understand
as my wife that I forbid you to see that young Alison again.  I don't
know anything about him except that I did him a favour once.  And I
don't mean to have it."

"I think you're excited," she said calmly, not at all like the child
that he had always known.  She gathered new strength from his sudden
weakness.  One of them must have reserve.

"Excited!" he mocked.  "Well, who wouldn't be?  A dirty-minded little
cad like that!"

"Hubert," she said roused at last, "you've got no right to call him
that.  It's you and Mrs. Herbertson and every one that have the dirty
minds.  I don't know what you think.  He's not a cad.  He's _your_
friend and I like him.  He's been nice to me."  A devil tempted her,
urging her on beyond the point of a good friend's defence.  "I'm very
fond of him," she said, provocatively.

And then that devil entered into Hubert Brett.  It had been a full
night and excitement all the way.  He had not yet recovered from that
garden scene.  And now, listening to her words, hearing his rival
praised, he felt again as he had felt when he thought that some harm
had come to her.  He seized her in his arms with an unreasoning
passion; held her there, resisting; kissed her furiously on lips, eyes,
everywhere; laughing and saying: "You are mine, mine.  You belong to
me, I tell you.  You're all mine!"

"Let me go, Hubert," she cried terrified.  She could not understand.

He let her go, at that.  She moved away and stood behind the table, as
though that gave her protection.  He gazed at her smiling, panting.

"I'm sorry," he said presently.  "It was your fault: you were so
maddening.  You don't see what it means to me."

The little gods of Comedy laughed out upon the tragic spectacle of a
man released by oddly joined emotions from his chains of Self and a
wife who wondered in fear whether Kit Kats drank champagne....

"And how did the dinner go off?" she asked soon, in her usual tones.




CHAPTER XIII

SECRETS

Helena came to the conclusion that her mother had been right in one
point: life was difficult.  She decided further that it was the Mrs.
Herbertsons who caused the trouble.  Things would be all right if no
one ever thought about them!

But she had Consolations beyond this Philosophy.

For one thing, Hubert almost instantly relented, the next day to be
precise, about poor Mr. Alison.  She, giving way in turn, had said she
would appease the vicar's wife and golfers by seeing less of him.  So
all that stupid fuss was over.

This, however, was not the real Consolation.  No, she had a secret.

Helena Brett's secret was not a typically wifely one.  It was based,
rather, on her childish games.  Every little girl has secrets--to the
scorn of boys--and when, like Helena, she is an only child, she has
them to herself.  Of course it is less satisfactory, because although
by its nature even a pretending secret needs but one, the whole fun
lies in telling it to some one else.

Helena told no one about hers.  And it was much more thrilling than
those early Devonshire affairs, which largely hinged on the exact
position of a fast-decaying mole.

The secret differed too from those of many wives in this, that it was
all about a woman; a woman she had never met, a woman she could never
meet.

For over a year now, since causeries and lectures on assorted topics
began to fit into a shapeless enough whole--a something that explained
or might explain what Helena called "Things"--she had put stray
thoughts down into a shilling diary.  At first they had been merely
sentences that touched her or inspired, things heard and read.  Then as
her mind began to feel its way, she wrote these extracts down, and half
ashamed at first, though nobody would ever see them, added her comments
on their theories.  How elementary the first had been!  She blushed,
re-reading them.  "'The best pilots are ashore'" (ran one on page two).
"Then are they really pilots?"

Soon, as was to be expected, she could not endure these accusing words,
even herself; and throwing the slim volume pell-mell in the fire,
bought and embarked upon a more ambitious tome.

Then indeed began the proper secret, for up till now though nobody had
ever known, (she could hear Hubert laughing at her and calling her "so
refreshing" ...) it had not been tremendously exciting.

Now it was, however, for the new book, started ambitiously enough as a
sort of brief record of her daily moods--she had so much time now that
she saw less of Geoffrey Alison--gradually burgeoned into something
even more colossal.

They never had been quite her own sensations in this second volume.
Those were so extremely dull!  No, they had been those of some one like
herself: a young wife with a busy husband, some one who felt a fool and
wanted not to, wanted very much, but he quite liked it really----oh
yes, sometimes, the first day or two, she felt a cad.  Hubert really
wasn't the least bit like that; it was all over-done; but she supposed
that it was easier--he always said it was--if you exaggerated than if
you just kept to the truth.  It all seemed rather horrid, somehow.  She
thought about tearing up the book.

And then--just about the time of the Kit Kat affair--began the real,
astounding, secret.

Virginia, as she called the wife inwardly (for it was all in the first
person)--Virginia began to grow!

It was not Helena's own moods and feelings now that went upon the
paper: something endlessly more thorough, more intense, more--well,
Helena's own word was "sloppy."

Frankly she despised Virginia.  That scene about the Kit Kats came into
her diary (it was not Helena's), quite different, about a different
thing in fact, and more hysterical.  She hoped she would not end up
like Virginia!  Yet in a way she saw herself there too, just as beneath
the husband she could detect ever so cruel a parody of Hubert in his
most naughty moments....

But oh, what fun it was!

When Hubert got up nowadays with some remark like; "Well, _I_ must do
my work!" she no longer felt lonely or out in the cold or inferior or
anything.  She just said to herself: "And so must I."

It was too splendid, having secrets.

She told nobody; not even Ally, who liked her to be ambitious.

No, it was her secret.




CHAPTER XIV

WAS IT WORTH WHILE?

Love in a cottage is admittedly no failure, quite delightful; but those
who have tried it usually end by owning that love in comfort would be
no less charming.

So it was with Hubert.

Nobody, he told himself, could be a better little housekeeper than
Helena, no little home more fresh and dainty than their own: but though
she never worried him, cleverly adapting their ways to a variable
income, he was always faced by the uncomfortable thought: "If this book
fails--" or "unless I write some short stories--" and after a while
these things begin to tell.  Within two years from marriage they had
told upon Hubert Brett.

And so had come into being that pot-boiler, confessed to Helena with
such solemnity on the wide, prudent, spaces of the Heath.

At first he had thought that it would be a hardship to exchange his own
realistic method, his studies of character, for those banalities of
plot and action independent of all motive, which wearied him even when
read, boiled down, in a magazine.  But slowly his mood of cynical
disdain changed to a real enjoyment, for any task is splendid so soon
as a man gets at firm grips with it.  He began to see that when once
you had got rid of the idea that action must proceed from character,
there was a certain joy in letting wild event pile up on wild event and
then be rapidly forgotten under even wilder.  When once you had
abandoned all reserve, there was a fierce delight in splashing pages
with unfettered sentiment; making frank puppets think, love, and
renounce as they had thought, loved, and renounced since the old fruity
days of the three-volume novel.  Of course it was all footle,
balderdash, but still (he told himself with pride) it was good footle,
splendid balderdash.  He had bought some of the most "popular" of
recent novels in six-penny editions, novels that had brought fortunes
to their authors, and by comparison with his, they did the same thing
in a bungling manner.  No able novelist, he cynically told his wife,
had ever tried till now to write a really good bad novel!

Helena loathed the whole enterprise, not only because she vaguely felt
that it was marriage with her which had made it needful, but because
she thought it so unworthy.  And not least unworthy, not least
loathsome, did she find his way of talking.  It had been so splendid to
hear him speak about his work in the old days: and now it was so
horrible.

"I've found a title at last," he said, emerging at lunch-time one day
when the book was in its revision-stage, and coming to her in the
drawing-room as usual.

"Hooray!" she cried, genuinely pleased because he had been worried as
to that and this would mean a cheery walk.  "What is it?  Is it good?"

"Couldn't be better," he replied, and as usual she missed the irony.
He paused and then; "_Was It Worth While?_"

"Oh, Hugh," she could not help exclaiming.  "That _isn't_ the title?"

"Don't you like it?" he enquired sardonically and let himself down
cheerily upon the sofa.

Helena of late had begun to express quite elaborate opinions even to
Hubert, who somehow always terrified her, rather, when it came to
intellect.  He was so much cleverer, she knew, and never seemed to take
her views as anything except a joke.  She always spoke a little
timidly.  He would have been surprised to hear how cleverly she talked
to Alison and others.  But that is true of many married couples.

"No," she began slowly.  "It's so--I don't know, but--well, so cheap.
All your others were so dignified and simple; I think _Wandering Stars_
was simply excellent; but this--it sort of reminds me of those plays
with names like _Did She Do It?_  You know what I mean!"

Hubert smiled grimly.  "You seem to think I'm trying to be dignified.
Not a bit of it: we're out for money!  Money, my dear Helena: no more
worry about bills, and our own motor-car!"  She could not bring herself
to be amused and he went on more moodily: "Do you imagine any woman
wants novels with titles that are dignified? and men aren't fools
enough to read them.  Of course you picked out my best seller for your
argument; but look at _The Bread of Idleness_.  That was dignified
enough and splendidly reviewed and sold two thousand copies; just about
a hundred pounds for me for one year's work!  No thanks, I've done with
dignity, _pro tem_.  There may be just about two thousand women with a
taste in dignity, but I want all the shop-girls this time: I'm out for
my hundred thousand!  I want them when they go to the seaside library
and pay their twopences to notice _Was It Worth While?_ in big letters
on a purple ground.  That'll make them think!  No more dignity for me:
you want to make them think, to make them wonder "Why?"  I'd call the
book _Why Smith Left Home_, if only it was new."

She did not answer for a few moments: then she said very gently but
with a new firmness; "Hugh dear, is it really necessary to do all this?
Can't we just go on as we have been doing?  I dare say I could manage
better, really, and I've often told you I simply don't know what to do
with my allowance: it's eating its head off in the bank!  Surely we're
not so hard up as all that?  I hate the whole idea."

"What whole idea?" he asked coldly.  One did look for encouragement
from one's own wife.  He got up to leave her.

"This pot-boiler, as you call it; the title; the way you talk about it;
everything.  It's all so different, and I've been so proud of the
others."  She gathered courage and went on: "Look here, Hugh, why not
give it up; start on a really good one that'll help your name; and
we'll live meanwhile on all that from my allowance in the bank?"  She
rose and took him by the arm persuasively.

"My dear child," he said with condescension, "you seem to think it's
all just money.  Tear the whole book up?  Don't worry your little head
with such things, but just go and see if Lily can't give us some early
lunch and then we'll go to Kew for tea!"

Helena, released with a kiss, went out feeling oddly rebellious in
spite of the Kew treat; and as for him, he was annoyed.  Give it up,
indeed!  She talked as though "all this" (for she had called it that)
were something criminal, instead of merely a book that was bound to
sell!  He certainly had no idea of sacrificing all his work for her
absurd dislikes....

Even the best artists do not so much object to popularity, when they
reach thirty-eight.

Hubert Brett, indeed, was more excited over this novel's birth than
over that of any other.  Almost every day he had to go up to see agent,
publisher, or editor.  He told Helena, as his excuse for leaving her so
much, that it was most important this book, as a "popular" one, should
be widely advertised and publishers were such eternal fools about that
sort of thing.  They always spent all their money upon other people's
trash and then said they could not afford to help on your own books!

As the day for publishing drew nearer, this theory bulked almost into
an obsession.  Helena came to dread the paper boy's arrival.  Hubert
would tear the dailies open, dash by instinct to the literary page, and
then give a discordant laugh of scorn or anger.

"Of course not," he would say.  "They won't tell any one till it's been
out a week!  They mean to keep it dark, trust them!"

"I dare say they're saving up for later on, dear," was her soothing
reply.  It was not always she, by now, who was the child.

But he would not be soothed.

Helena was glad when the day arrived, although it was a nervous time.
He had been full, the night before, of how amusing it would be to hear
the critics slang him for a change, instead of finding all those dull
superlatives that put the public off: but remembering his past fury
with those few reviews which found some blemish in his work, she had
her misgivings.

"Only I expect," she said, "it may seem rather curious at first--having
bad notices, I mean."  She looked across at him covertly and anxiously.
She had begun, by now, to knit waistcoats for him and felt as though
they had been married for eternity.

Hubert, lounging idly in the other armchair, merely laughed.  "Curious?
Well, amusing....  It'll certainly be something new to be slated by the
critics and rushed after by the libraries.  It's usually been the other
way about!"  He knew, himself, that he would feel the blame from
critics who had liked his work, but then----  After all, if the readers
liked it and were thousands where they had been hundreds----!  And
there was the money....

Next morning the paper boy delivered a specially large roll of papers
and Hubert flung himself upon them with unusual vigour.  Helena, her
eyes fixed on a letter where the words all flickered, was anxious to
what might seem an unjustified extent.  She could just see him with one
corner of her eye.

Paper after paper was torn open; his gaze ran greedily along the
columns; but he never paused to read.

At length he flung the last one down with a fierce gesture.

"It's a boycott," he cried petulantly.  "I've always had at least two
notices, for years, upon the day.  We sent them out early on purpose.
It's nothing but a boycott."

He seemed to find some consolation in that word with its historical
immensity.

"How too bad, dearest," murmured Helena, in duty and with a sinking
heart.  She saw no cause for any boycott.  And she knew that his other
novels had better deserved any privilege.

On four dreary mornings the same tragic farce took place, and also with
the evening papers.  Then on the fifth day Hubert's fast-travelling
eyes stopped abruptly, he said "Ha!" and then read out with a naïve joy
"_Was It Worth While?_"

"Good," exclaimed Helena, still doubtful.

Suddenly he gave a wild laugh.  "I like that," he said.  "That is
rich."  He put the paper down very gently on the table.  Then he raised
the cover from the buttered eggs.

"What is it, dear?" she compelled herself to ask.

"They say," announced Hubert in extremely level tones, "this habit of
publishing a well-known author's early works as new is one that has
grown far too common."

Then, letting himself go; "Early works?  I'll show them!  It is
libellous.  I can prove my case to the hilt."

"I shouldn't worry with them," she said, feeling inadequate.  "Perhaps
it will just make the book sell?  We expected them to be all nasty,
didn't we?"  She tried to speak brightly.  Then an inspiration came to
her.  "Perhaps there are some better ones?" she said.  The great thing
would be to divert his mind.  A law-case would be terrible.  Nobody got
anything, ever, except the barristers.

He passed the heap of unopened papers scornfully across to her.  "You
look at them," he said.  "I don't know why I do or why one cares.
They're just a pack of failures.  I always despise myself for looking
at their stuff at all."  He opened a letter with unneeded violence.

With slow unpractised fingers Helena began to search for reviews.  "No,
no," she said at each, until she thought (he was so quiet), that this
might be annoying him and went on with her task in silence.

Then her hands suddenly clutched the paper tightly, symbolic of her
effort to say nothing, for her eyes had caught the heading, _Was It
Worth While?_  The notice ran to half a column and this was an
important paper.  She blessed her cleverness in having looked.

One moment later, she was blessing her forethought in not saying
anything.  For this was the review:


"_Was It Worth While?_

"For some time now it has been an interesting question, with those who
can find any interest at all in the popular novels of to-day, as to
what exactly may be the peculiar touchstone of popularity.  We can most
of us recall the names of two or three books which have run into their
quarter of a million copies, according to advertisements: and in
reading them hungrily for a solution of the problem, we have been more
than a little astounded by the crudeness of the fare submitted.  We
have been unwilling, as good optimists of human nature, to believe that
mere literary vices can account for any library demand.

"Mr. Hubert Brett, perhaps unconsciously, has done us a good service.
We do not, let it be premised at once, refer to our gratitude for his
latest novel.  Some of Mr. Brett's work, notably _Splendid Misery_ and
_The Bread of Idleness_, has been praised in these columns for the
sincere attempt which the author made in it to get at grips with the
problems of real life, forgetting (as few authors can) the fictionists
who went before him.  In _Was It Worth While?_ he seems to have
thought, for a change, of almost nothing else.  The book is a weird
salad of remembered scenes, an olla podrida of episodes we wish we
could forget.  It would be wasting time and space indeed to attempt
synopsis of Mr. Brett's astounding tale--for it is not a novel, however
one define that vaguest of all literary products.  By lumping together
the worst and cheapest portion of all the bad and clap-trap tales which
have seen light since printing was unhappily invented, one may arrive
at a far better notion of this book than can be gained by wading
through its crowded pages.  The process, let us add, is also less
fatiguing.

"But this is where Mr. Brett has done us, we repeat, a service.  _Was
It Worth While?_ (the name alone is symptomatic) has all the qualities
of its successful predecessors: the well-worn types, that call for no
brain-effort after work; the utterly untrammelled sentiment; the
shapeless slices of religion: he has put into his salad all the right
ingredients, except one, which he, less lucky than the other cooks, did
not possess.  And that ingredient, we now believe, is no less than
sincerity.  The other writers have done this sort of thing well,
because they could do no better; and whilst the large public applauded,
we have pitied.  Mr. Brett has done this sort of thing, although he can
do better; and whilst the public will see through him, we despise his
effort.  Into his motives it would be impertinent to enquire.  Perhaps,
after all, the book is a mere literary squib.  Mr. Brett, it well may
be, has no desire to gull the public into a belief in his weak
sentiment and crude religion: he wishes to deride those qualities in
others.  If so, we congratulate and thank him once again: we understand
at last the essential quality (and it is, we confess, a fine one) in
the Library big-seller.  On any other ground, however, it certainly was
not _Worth While_."


Helena did not dare to read all down the column.  She read the last
words and she bit her lips to keep back tears of which she was ashamed.
She knew that it was true--and she hated, loathed the man or woman who
had written it.  She would give anything, all she possessed, all that
poor Hubert had thought he would make from the horrid book, to spare
him this review: to shield him from the pain that she knew it was bound
to give him.

"Found one?" he asked.  Her hands almost dropped the paper.

"No," she said.  "There don't seem any more, unless I've managed to
miss one.  Now I'm seeing what has happened!"  And she contrived to
laugh.

He appeared to feel relief rather than disappointment.

"You don't often do that," he said cheerily enough.  "I thought you
despised politics and everything like that?"

"I don't often get the chance to read them," she said and hurriedly
turned on to the next page, "considering you always cling firmly to the
D.T. till I've got to begin my housework!"  This last was her name for
what he, in a Yankee spirit, nicknamed "chores."

So for the moment that danger was averted, but Helena knew it was
really no more than postponed, and long before the day was over, wished
that she had faced it instantly.

When he came in to her just before dinner she knew that he had seen
before he spoke a word.  He drew the notice, neatly cut out, from his
pocket, and she made a pretence of reading it.

"It's merely spite," was all he said.  "How dare they call me
insincere?  They know it's a good seller and that's just what they
can't stand.  I've written to the editor and I hope I get that swine
the boot."

"Is that very kind, dear?" she asked.  "It's his job, you know, and you
said bad reviews would sell the book."

He gave an angry snort.  "Yes, I dare say, but not this kind.  No plot,
nothing except that its fatiguing and _may_ be a burlesque.  English
people hate being puzzled even more than they hate being bored."

This saying had the effect, she thought, of cheering him a little, for
he gave a sardonic laugh and said:

"Well, no matter, let them do their worst.  Trust the public later on
to find out that the novel's bad! ... When's dinner?"




CHAPTER XV

DISCOVERIES

An Ethical Society might pass a winter's evening in this debate: Does
it need more strength to endure failure or to bear success?  The
dangers upon either road stand out easily, for all but the actual
wayfarer.  By the one he may fall into the slough of Bitterness, whilst
the other, far more pleasant as it draws him on, may lead to no more
than the pitiable, luxurious cities of Arrogance and Meanness.

The problem certainly needs no elaboration in this place, since
Hubert's path lay all too clearly towards failure.  "I fear," wrote his
publisher as an old friend, "it is no use concealing the fact that
people do not want the book.  There have as yet been no repeat orders
from libraries or booksellers.  We can only face the fact and hope to
do better with the next.  As you know, in my opinion the book was not
up to your usual high level."

"Who wants his damned opinion?" growled Hubert out loud, though alone,
and crumpled up the letter.  Why, publishers weren't even critics!

As to these last, their unanimity for once was wonderful.

There are ingenious authors who amuse themselves by printing excerpts
from reviews of their last novel, alternately conflicting, thuswise;
"An able novel: _Tooting Sentinel_.  Weak and formless: _Times_.  An
arresting piece of work, whoever by: _Stafford News_.  An amateur
affair: _Standard_;"--thinking in this manner to have blackened for
evermore the ancient art of Criticism in any decent-minded person's
eyes.  They scarcely realise, poor injured souls, that the thing is an
Art.  Were it but a machine, it doubtless would attain the same result
from each book, whether put before it by a Fleet Street expert or a
Stafford tyro.  Because it is an Art, however, and all Art is merely
the expression of an individual emotion, it follows that each book must
react on every critic in a different way.  These notices, so pompous
with _The Times_ or _Stafford News_ above them, are not worked out with
prayer by the whole paper's staff; they stand for one opinion, no
less-

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