The Sixth Sense: A Novel
by Stephen McKenna · English · Gutenberg #37164 · 488,208 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Sixth Sense: A Novel
Author: Stephen McKenna
Release date: August 22, 2011 [eBook #37164]
Language: English
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THE SIXTH SENSE
A Novel
by
STEPHEN McKENNA
Author of "The Reluctant Lovers" "Sheila Intervenes"
"The World is a Comedy to those that think, a tragedy
to those who feel."
_Horace Walpole to Sir Horace Mann._
London
Chapman & Hall, Ltd.
1915
À L'INTROUVABLE
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
PROLOGUE. LONDON AFTER TWENTY YEARS 1
I. WAR À OUTRANCE 25
II. SUPPER WITH A MYSTIC 46
III. BRANDON COURT 62
IV. THE FIRST ROUND 84
V. COMMEMORATION 103
VI. THE SECOND ROUND 123
VII. A CAUSE CÉLÈBRE 140
VIII. HENLEY--AND AFTER 160
IX. THE THIRD ROUND 178
X. THE ZEAL THAT OUTRUNS DISCRETION 197
XI. THE AMATEUR DETECTIVE 214
XII. THE SIXTH SENSE 232
XIII. OR THE OBVIOUS ALTERNATIVE 247
XIV. THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY 263
XV. THE RAID 279
XVI. RIMINI 296
EPILOGUE 308
THE SIXTH SENSE
PROLOGUE
LONDON AFTER TWENTY YEARS
"As when a traveller, bound from North to South,
Scouts fur in Russia: what's its use in France?
In France spurns flannel: where's its need in Spain?
In Spain drops cloth, too cumbrous for Algiers!
Linen goes next, and last the skin itself,
A superfluity at Timbuctoo.
When, through his journey was the fool at ease?
I'm at ease now, friend; worldly in this world,
I take and like its way of life; I think
My brothers who administer the means,
Live better for my comfort--that's good too;
And God, if he pronounce upon such life,
Approves my service, which is better still."
ROBERT BROWNING: "Bishop Blougram's Apology."
I paused, with my foot on the lowest step of the Club, to mark the
changes that had overtaken Pall Mall during my twenty years' absence
from England.
The old War Office, of course, was gone; some of the shops on the
north side were being demolished; and the Automobile Club was new and
unassimilated. In my day, too, the Athenæum had not been painted
Wedgwood-green. Compared, however, with the Strand or Mall, Piccadilly
or Whitehall, marvellously little change had taken place. I made an
exception in favour of the character and velocity of the traffic: the
bicycle boom was in its infancy when I left England: I returned to
find the horse practically extinct, and the streets of London as
dangerous as the railway stations of America.
I wondered how long it would take me to get used to the London of
1913.... Then I wondered if I should find anything to keep me long
enough to grow acclimatised. Chance had brought me back to England,
chance and the "wandering foot" might as easily bear me away again. It
has always been a matter of indifference to me where I live, what I
do, whom I meet. If I never seem to get bored, it is perhaps because I
am never long enough in one place or at one occupation. There was no
reason why England should not keep me amused....
A man crossed the road and sold me a _Westminster Gazette_. I opened
it to see what was engaging the England of 1913, remembering as I did
so that the _Westminster_ was the last paper of importance to be
published before I went abroad. As I glanced at the headlines, twenty
years seemed to drop out of my life. Another Home Rule Bill was being
acclaimed as the herald of the Millennium; Ulster was being told to
fight and be right: the Welsh Church was once more being
disestablished, while in foreign politics a confederation of Balkan
States was spending its blood and treasure in clearing Europe of the
Turk, to a faint echoing accompaniment of Gladstone's "bag and
baggage" trumpet call. At home and abroad, English politics repeated
themselves with curiously dull monotony.
Then I turned to the middle page, and saw I had spoken too hastily.
"Suffragette Outrages" seemed to fill three columns of the paper. My
return to England had synchronised with a political campaign more
ruthless, intransigeant and unyielding than anything since the Fenian
outrages of my childhood. I read of unique fifteenth-century houses
burnt to the ground, interrupted meetings, assaults on Ministers,
sabotage in public buildings, and the demolition of plate-glass
windows at the hands of an uncompromising, fearless and diabolically
ingenious army of destroyers. On the other side of the account were
entered long sentences, hunger-strikes, forcible feeding and something
that was called "A Cat and Mouse Act." I was to hear more of that
later: it was indeed the political parent of the "New Militant
Campaign" whose life coincided with my own residence in England. I
fancy the supporters of the bill like Roden, Rawnsley or Jefferson
genuinely believed they had killed hunger-striking--and with it the
spirit of militancy--when the Government assumed the power of
imprisoning, releasing and re-imprisoning at will. The event proved
that they had only driven militancy into a fresh channel....
It is curious to reflect that as I at last mounted the steps and
entered the Club, I was wondering where it would be possible to meet
the resolute, indomitable women who formed the Council of War to the
militant army. It would be a new, alluring experience. I was so
occupied with my thoughts that I hardly noticed the hall porter
confronting me with the offer of the New Members' Address Book.
"Surely a new porter?" I suggested. At ten guineas a year for twenty
years, it was costing me two hundred and ten pounds to enter the
Club, and I did not care to have my expensive right challenged.
"Seventeen years, sir," he answered with the gruff, repellent
stiffness of the English official.
"I must have been before your time, then," I said.
Of course he disbelieved me, on the score of age if for no other
reason; and the page boy who dogged my steps into the Cloak Room, was
sent--I have no doubt--to act as custodian of the umbrellas. My age is
forty-two, but I have never succeeded in looking more than about eight
and twenty: perhaps I have never tried, as I find that a world of
personal exertion and trouble is saved by allowing other people to do
my trying, thinking, arranging for me ... whatever I am, others have
made me.
There was not a single familiar face in the hall, and I passed into
the Morning Room, like a ghost ascending from Hades to call on Æneas.
Around me in arm-chair groups by the fire, or quarrelsome knots
suspended over the day's bill of fare, were sleek, full-bodied
creatures of dignified girth and portentous gravity--fathers of
families, successes in life. These--I told myself--were my
contemporaries; their faces were for the most part unknown, but this
was hardly surprising as many of my friends are dead and most of the
survivors are to be found at the Bar. A barrister with anything of a
practice cannot afford time to lunch in the spacious atmosphere of
Pall Mall, and the smaller the practice, the greater his anxiety to
conceal his leisure. For a moment I felt painfully insignificant,
lonely and unfriended.
I was walking towards the Coffee Room when a heavy hand descended on
my shoulder and an incredulous voice gasped out----
"Toby, by Gad!"
No one had called me by that name for fifteen years, and I turned to
find a stout, middle-aged man with iron-grey hair and a red face
extending a diffident palm.
"I beg your pardon," he added hastily, as he saw my expression of
surprise. "I thought for a moment...."
"You were right," I interrupted.
"Toby Merivale," he said with profound deliberation. "I thought you
were dead."
The same remark had already been made to me four times that morning.
"That's not original," I objected.
"Do you know who I am?" he asked.
"You used to be Arthur Roden in the old days when I knew you. That was
before they made you a Privy Councillor and His Majesty's
Attorney-General."
"By Gad, I can hardly believe it!" he exclaimed, shaking my hand a
second time and carrying me off to luncheon. "What have you been doing
with yourself? Where have you been? Why did you go away?"
"As Dr. Johnson once remarked...." I began.
"'Questioning is not a mode of conversation among gentlemen,'" he
interrupted. "I know; but if you drop out of the civilised world for
the third of a lifetime...."
"You've not ordered yourself any lunch."
"Oh, hang lunch!"
"But you haven't ordered any for me, either."
My poor story--for what it was worth--started with the plovers' eggs,
and finished neck-to-neck with the cheese. I told him how I had gone
down to the docks twenty years before to see young Handgrove off to
India, and how at the last moment he had cajoled me into accompanying
him.... Arthur came with me in spirit from India to the diamond mines
of South Africa where I made my money, took part with me in the
Jameson Raid, and kept me company during those silent, discreet months
when we all lay _perdus_ wondering what course the Government was
going to pursue towards the Raiders. Then I sketched my share in the
war, and made him laugh by saying I had been three times mentioned in
despatches. My experience of blackwater fever was sandwiched in
between the settlement of South Africa, and my departure to the scene
of the Russo-Japanese war: last of all came the years of vegetation,
during which I had idled round the Moorish fringe of the Desert or
sauntered from one Mediterranean port to another.
"What brings you home now?" he asked.
"Home? Oh, to England. I've a young friend stationed out at Malta, and
when I was out there three weeks ago I found his wife down with a
touch of fever. He wanted her brought to London, couldn't come
himself, so suggested I should take charge. _J'y suis_...."
I hesitated.
"Well?"
"I don't know, Arthur. I've no plans. If you have any suggestions to
make...."
"Come and spend Whitsun with me in Hampshire."
"Done."
"You're not married?"
"'Sir,'" I said in words Sir James Murray believes Dr. Johnson ought
to have used, "'in order to be facetious it is not necessary to be
indecent.'"
"And never will be, I suppose."
"I've no plans. You, of course...."
I paused delicately, in part because I was sure he wanted to tell me
all about himself, in part because I could not for the life of me
remember what had come of the domestic side of his career during my
absence abroad. He was married, and the father of a certain number of
children before I left England; I had no idea how far the
ramifications went.
It appeared that his wife--who was still living--had presented him
with Philip, now aged twenty-six, his father's private secretary and
member for some Scotch borough; Sylvia, aged twenty-four, and
unmarried; Robin, aged twenty-one, and in his last year at Oxford; and
Michael, an _enfant terrible_ of sixteen still at Winchester. I fancy
there were no more; these were certainly all I ever met, either in
Cadogan Square or Brandon Court.
In his public life I suppose Arthur Roden would be called a successful
man. I remember him during the barren first few years of practice, but
soon after my departure from England reports used to reach me showing
the increasing volume of his work, until he became one of the busiest
juniors on the Common Law side, reading briefs at four in the morning,
and sending a clerk out to buy his new clothes. After taking silk at
an early age, he had entered the House and been made Attorney-General
in 1912.
"I was appointed the same day your brother was raised to the Bench,"
he told me.
"I should think he makes a pretty bad Judge," I suggested.
"Resolute," said Arthur. "We want firmness."
I knew what that meant. According to unsympathetic papers, Mr. Justice
Merivale had conducted a Bloody Assize among the Militants of the
Suffrage Army. When Roden prosecuted in person, there was short shrift
indeed.
"We've killed militancy between us," he boasted.
"And I understand you're burnt together in effigy."
His face grew suddenly stern.
"They haven't stopped at that. There've been two attempts to fire
Brandon Court, and one wing of your brother's house was burnt down a
few weeks ago. I expect you found him rather shaken."
"I haven't seen him yet."
Arthur looked surprised.
"Oh, you ought to," he said. "I'm afraid he won't be able to last out
the rest of the term without a change. It's got on his nerves. Got on
his wife's nerves, too. Your niece is the only one who doesn't seem to
care; but then I think girls have very little imagination. It's the
same with Sylvia. By the way, I suppose you know you've got a niece?"
We paid our bills, and walked upstairs to the Smoking Room.
"What'll be their next move?" I asked.
"I don't think there will be a next move," he answered slowly. "What
can they do?"
I shrugged my shoulders.
"I'm only an onlooker, but d'you believe this Cat and Mouse Act is
going to stop them? My knowledge is mere newspaper knowledge, but to
be beaten by a device like that--it isn't in keeping with the
character of the women who've organised the Militant Campaign so far."
"What _can_ they do?" he repeated.
"I don't know."
"They don't either. One or two of the most determined law breakers are
in reality spies; they've kept us posted in the successive steps of
the campaign up to the present. Now they report that there's no plan
for the future. They know it would be futile to start assassination;
if they go on burning and breaking, a proportion of them get caught
and punished. Hunger striking's been killed by the Cat and Mouse Act.
Well, militancy's dead, Toby. If you come down to the House to-night,
you'll be present at the funeral."
"What's happening?"
"It's the division on the Suffrage amendment to the Electoral Reform
Bill. Hullo! here's Philip. Let me introduce my eldest son."
I made friends with Philip as we crossed the Park and entered the
House. He was curiously like the Arthur I had known twenty years
before--tall, dark-haired, clean-featured, with an exuberant zest for
life tempered to an almost imperceptible degree by the reserve of the
responsible public man. The physical and mental vigour of father and
son left me silently admiring; as they hurried along at a swinging
five miles an hour, I took stock of their powerful, untiring frames,
quick movements, and crisp, machine-made speech. They were hard,
business-like, unimaginative, with the qualities of those defects and
the defects of those qualities; trained, taught, and equipped to play
the midwife to any of the bureaucratic social reforms that have been
brought into the English political world the last few years, but
helpless and impotently perplexed in face of an idea outside their
normal ken. They were highly efficient average English politicians.
Either or both would reform you the Poor Law, nationalise a railway,
or disestablish a Church; but send Philip to India, set Arthur to
carry out Cromer's work in Egypt, and you would see English dominion
driven from two continents as speedily as North drove it from America.
It was one of the paradoxes of English politics that Arthur should
have been entrusted with the problem of Suffrage militancy, a paradox
of the same order as that whereby Strafford grappled with the problem
of a parliamentary system.
"You'll stay a few minutes," Philip urged as I abandoned him to Empire
and wandered off to pay my belated respects to my brother.
I glanced round me and shook my head. I would not grow old all at
once, and yet--Gladstone was Prime Minister when I left England: his
statue now dominated the public lobby. And Salisbury, Harcourt,
Chamberlain, Parnell, Labby--their voices were sunk in the great
silence. In my day Committee Room Number Fifteen used to be an object
of historic interest....
"They say the lion and the lizard keep
The Halls where Jamshyd gloried, and drank deep:
And Bahram, the great hunter, the wild ass
Stamps o'er his head, and he lies fast asleep."
I quoted the lines to Philip apologetically, reminding him that the
Omar Khayyam vogue had not come in when I left England. "I shall see
you at Brandon Court," I added.
"What are you going to do till then?" he asked.
"Heaven knows! I never make arrangements. Things just happen to me. I
always contrive to be in the thick of whatever's going on. I don't
know how long I shall stay in England, or where I shall go to
afterwards. But whether it's a railway strike or a coronation, I shall
be there. I don't like it, I'm a peaceful man by nature, but I can't
help it. I always get dragged into these things."
Philip scratched his chin thoughtfully.
"I don't know that we've got any great sensations at the present
time," he said.
"Something will turn up," I answered in the words of one greater than
myself, as I waved my hand in farewell and started back in the
direction of the Club.
I knew my brother would not leave Court till at least four o'clock, so
I had to dispose of an hour before it was time to call round in Pont
Street. The Club had emptied since luncheon, and I drew blank in one
place after another until fate directed my steps to the Card Room.
There were two men playing bézique, one of them poor Tom Wilding whom
I had left lame and returned to find half paralysed and three parts
blind. The other--who played with a wonderful patience, calling the
names of the cards--I recognised as my young friend Lambert Aintree
who had parted from me in Morocco five years before. I reminded them
both of my identity, and we sat gossiping till an attendant arrived to
wheel poor Wilding away for his afternoon drive.
Leaving the card-table, Aintree joined me on the window-seat and
subjected my face, clothes and general appearance to a rapid scrutiny.
It was the practised, comprehensive glance of an old physician in
making diagnosis, and I waited for him to pronounce on my case. Five
years ago in Morocco he had exhibited a disconcerting and almost
uncanny skill in reading character and observing little forgotten
points that every one else missed. The results of his observation were
usually shrouded in the densest veils of uncommunicativeness: I
sometimes wonder if I have ever met a more silent man. When you could
get him to talk, he was usually worth hearing: for the most part,
however, talking like every other form of activity seemed too much of
an exertion. I understand him now better than I did, but I am not so
foolish as to pretend that I understand him completely. I am a man of
three dimensions: Aintree, I am convinced, was endowed with the
privilege of a fourth.
"Well?" I said invitingly, as he brought his examination to an end and
looked out of the window.
His answer was to throw me over a cigarette and light one himself.
"Take an interest in me," I said plaintively. "Say you thought I was
dead...."
"Everyone's said that."
"True," I admitted.
"And they've all asked you when you landed, and how long you were
staying, and what brought you to England."
"It would be rather friendly if you did the same."
"You couldn't tell me--any more than you could tell them."
"But I could. It was Sunday morning."
"About then. I knew that. You've been here long enough to get English
clothes, and," he gave me another rapid look, "to have them made for
you. How long you're here for--you don't know."
"Not to a day," I conceded. "Well, why did I come?"
"You don't know."
"Pardon me." I told him of my visit to Malta and the charitable
guardianship of my friend's convalescent wife.
"But that wasn't the real reason."
"It was the only reason."
"The only one you thought of at the time."
I was amazed at the certainty of his tone.
"My dear fellow," I said. "I am a more or less rational creature, a
reason comes along and compels me to do a thing. If I were a woman, no
doubt I should do a thing and find reasons for it afterwards."
"Don't you ever do a thing on impulse, instinctively? And analyse your
motives afterwards to see what prompted you?"
"Oh, possibly. But not on this occasion."
"You're sure?"
"What are you driving at?" I asked.
"You'll find out in time."
"I should like to know now."
Aintree inhaled the smoke of his cigarette and answered with eyes
half-closed.
"Most men of your age wake up one morning to find they've turned
forty. They feel it would be good to renew their youth, they play with
the idea of getting married."
"Is this to my address?" I asked.
"D'you feel it applies to your case?"
"I can solemnly assure you that such an idea never crossed my mind."
"Not consciously."
"Nor unconsciously."
"What do you know of the unconscious ideas in your own mind?"
"Hang it," I said, "what do _you_ know of the unconscious ideas in
my--or any one else's mind?"
"I'm interested in them," he answered quietly. "Tell me if you ever
feel my prophecy coming true."
"You shall be best man," I promised him. "Married! One doesn't marry
at my age."
It was a glorious spring afternoon, and I suggested that he should
accompany me part of my way to Pont Street.
"Tell me what you've been doing with yourself since you stayed with me
five years ago," I said as we stepped into Pall Mall.
He seemed to shiver and retreat into his shell as soon as the
conversation became focussed on himself.
"I've done nothing," he answered briefly, and relapsed into one of his
wonted spells of silence.
In the blazing afternoon sunlight I returned him the compliment of a
careful scrutiny. He had come to Morocco five years before as a boy of
one-and-twenty just down from Oxford. A girl to whom he had been
engaged had died of consumption a few months before, and he was
straying into the Desert, broken, unnerved, and hopeless, to forget
her. I must have seemed sympathetic, or he would not have unburdened
himself of the whole pitiful little tragedy. At twenty-one you feel
these things more keenly perhaps than in after life; there were
moments when I feared he was going to follow her....
Five years may have healed the wound, but they left him listless,
dispirited, and sore. He was more richly endowed with nerves than any
man or woman I know, and all the energy of his being seemed
requisitioned to keep them under control. Less through love of mystery
than for fear of self-betrayal his face wore the expressionless mask
of a sphynx. He was fair, thin, and pale, with large frightened eyes,
sapphire blue in colour, and troubled with the vague, tired
restlessness that you see in overwrought, sensitive women. The nose
and mouth were delicate and almost ineffeminate, with lips tightly
closed as though he feared to reveal emotion in opening them. You see
women and children with mouths set in that thin, hard line when they
know a wickering lip or catch in the breath will give the lie to their
brave front. And there were nerves, nerves, nerves everywhere, never
so much present as when the voice was lazily drawling, the hands
steady, and the eyes dreamily half-closed. I wonder if anything ever
escaped those watchful, restless eyes; his entire soul seemed stored
up and shining out of them; and I wonder what was the process of
deduction in his curious, quick, feminine brain. Before I left England
I tried to evolve a formula that would fit him; "a woman's senses and
intuition in a man's body" was the best I could devise, and I am
prepared at once to admit the inadequacy of the label. For one thing
his intuition transcended that of any woman I have ever known.
As he would not talk about himself, I started to wile away the time by
telling him of my meeting with the Rodens, and their invitation to
Hampshire.
"I was asked too," he told me. "I shan't go."
"But why not?"
"Unsociability, I suppose. I don't go out much."
"It's a bachelor's party, I understand."
"That's the best thing I've heard about it. Did they say who'd be
there? If you're not careful you'll have politics to eat, politics to
drink, and politics to smoke."
"Come and create a diversion," I suggested.
"I'll think about it. Is Phil going to be there? Oh, then it won't be
a bachelor party. I could name one young woman who will be there for
certain, only I mustn't make mischief. Did you find Roden much
changed?"
I tried to sort out my impressions of Arthur.
"Harder than he used to be. I shouldn't care to be a militant
prosecuted by him."
Aintree raised his eyebrows slightly.
"I don't think they mind him; they can look after themselves."
"I've never met one."
"Would you like to?"
"Who is she?"
"Joyce Davenant, the queen bee of the swarm. Dine with me to-night at
the Ritz; seven o'clock, I'm afraid, but we are going to a first
night."
"Is she a daughter of old Jasper Davenant? I used to shoot with him."
"The younger daughter. Do you know her sister, Mrs. Wylton? She's
coming too. You'd better meet her," he went on with a touch of acidity
in his tone, "you'll hear her name so much during the next few months
that it will be something to say you've seen her in the flesh."
I only remembered Elsie Wylton as a young girl with her hair down her
back. Of her husband, Arnold Wylton, I suppose every one has heard; he
enjoys the reputation of being a man who literally cannot be flogged
past a petticoat. How such a girl came to marry such a man no rational
person has ever been able to explain; and it never sweetens the
amenities of debate to talk vaguely of marriages being made in heaven.
I met Wylton twice, and on both occasions he was living in retirement
abroad. I have no wish to meet him a third time.
"How did she ever come to marry a fellow like that?" I asked.
Aintree shrugged his shoulders.
"Her father was dead, or he'd have stopped it. Nobody else felt it
their business to interfere, and it wouldn't have made the slightest
difference if they had. You know what the Davenants are like--or
perhaps you don't. Nothing shakes them when they've made up their
minds to do a thing."
"But didn't she know the man's reputation?" I persisted.
"I don't suppose so. Wylton had never been mixed up in any overt
scandal, so the women wouldn't know; and it's always a tall order for
a man to lay information against another man when a girl's engaged to
marry him. She just walked into it with her eyes shut."
"And now she's divorcing him at last?"
"The other way about."
I felt sure I could not have heard him correctly.
"The other way about," he repeated deliberately. "Oh, she'd have got
rid of him years ago if he'd given her the chance! Wylton was too
clever; he knew the divorce law inside out; he was alive to all its
little technicalities. He's sailed close to the wind a number of
times, but never close enough to be in danger."
"And what's happening now?" I asked.
"She's forced his hand--gone to some trouble to compromise herself.
She couldn't divorce him, it was the only way, she's making him
divorce her. Rather a burlesque of justice, isn't it? Elsie Wylton,
the respondent in an undefended action! The daughter of Jasper
Davenant--one of the finest, cleanest, bravest women I know. And the
successful petitioner will be Arnold Wylton, who ought to have been
thrashed out of half the houses and clubs in London. Who ought to have
been cited as a co-respondent half a dozen times over if he hadn't
been so clever in covering up his tracks. I wonder if he's got
sufficient humour to appreciate the delicate irony of _his_ coming
sanctimoniously into court to divorce _her_. It's a sickening
business, we won't discuss it--but it will be the one topic of
conversation in a few weeks' time."
We walked in silence for a few yards.
"Was the man any one of note?" I asked. "The co-respondent?"
"Fellow in the Indian Army," Aintree answered. "I don't suppose you
know him. It was a bogus case; he just lent his name."
I sniffed incredulously.
"The world won't believe _that_," I said.
"Elsie's going to make it."
I shook my head.
"She can't. Would you?"
"Most certainly. So will you when you've met her. You knew the father
well? She's her father's own daughter."
The gospel of Jasper Davenant was simple and sound. Never pull a
horse, never forge a cheque, never get involved in the meshes of
married women. Apart from that, nothing mattered: though to be his
true disciple, you must never lose your head, never lose your temper,
never be afraid of man or woman, brute or devil. He was the North
American Indian of chivalrous romance, transplanted to Cumberland with
little loss of essential characteristics.
"I look forward to meeting them both," I said as we parted at
Buckingham Gate. "Seven o'clock? I'll try not to be late."
Walking on alone through Sloane Square, something set me thinking of
my boast to Philip Roden. Within three hours I was apparently going to
meet one woman whose name was mixed up with the most prominent _cause
célèbre_ of the year, and another who was a _cause célèbre_ in
herself--the redoubtable Miss Joyce Davenant of the Militant Suffrage
Union. That my introduction should come from the peace-loving,
nerve-ridden Aintree, was in accordance with the best ironical
traditions of life. I was not surprised then: I should have still less
reason to be surprised now. In the last six months he has placed me
under obligations which I shall never be able to meet: in all
probability he expects no repayment; the active side of his unhappy,
fatalistic temperament is seen in his passionate desire to make life
less barren and melancholy for others. Tom Wilding can testify to this
at the bézique table: Elsie and Joyce and I can endorse the testimony
in a hundred ways and half a hundred places.
As I turned into Pont Street a private car was drawn up by the kerb
opposite my brother's house. I dawdled for a few steps while a pretty,
brown-eyed, black-haired girl said good-bye to a friend at the door
and drove away. It was no more than a glimpse that I caught, but the
smiling, small-featured face attracted me. I wondered who she was, and
who was the girl with auburn hair who persisted in standing on my
brother's top step long after the car was out of sight, instead of
retiring indoors and leaving me an unembarrassed entry.
I pretended not to see her as I mounted the steps, but the pretence
was torn away when I heard her addressing me as "Uncle Simon."
"You must be Gladys," I said, wondering if I looked as sheepish as I
felt. "How did you recognise me?"
"By your photograph," she said. "You haven't altered a bit."
On the whole I carried it off fairly well, though I was glad Arthur
Roden was not present after my implied familiarity with my niece's
existence. Of course I knew I had a niece, and that her birthday
fell--like the Bastille--on July 14th. Usually I remembered the date
and sent her some little trifle, and she would write me a friendly
letter of thanks. If I had kept count of the number of birthdays, I
should have known she was now nineteen, but then one never does keep
count of these things. Frankly, I had imagined her to be about seven
or eight, and her handwriting--by becoming steadily more unformed and
sporadic the older she grew--did nothing to dispel the illusion.
Instead of curious little pieces of jewellery I might easily have sent
her a doll....
"Where's the Judge?" I asked as she kissed me and led the way upstairs
to her room.
"He's not home yet," she answered to my relief.
"And your mother?"
But my sister-in-law also was out, and I reconciled myself without
difficulty to the prospect of taking tea alone with my niece. Possibly
as a romantic reaction from her father, possibly with her mother Eve's
morbid craving for forbidden fruit, Gladys had elevated me into a
Tradition. The whole of her pretty, sun-splashed room seemed hung with
absurd curios I had sent her from out-of-the-way parts of the world,
while on a table by the window stood a framed photograph of myself in
tweeds that only an undergraduate would have worn, and a tie loosely
arranged in a vast sailor's knot after the unsightly fashion of the
early 'nineties. My hair was unduly long, and at my feet lay a large
dog; it must have been a property borrowed for the purpose, as I hate
and have always hated dogs.
"A wasted, unsatisfactory life, Gladys," I said as my tour of
inspection concluded itself in front of my own portrait. "I wish I'd
known about you before. I'd have asked Brian to let me adopt you."
"Would you like to now?"
In the East a complimentary speech is not usually interpreted so
literally or promptly.
"I'm afraid it's too late," I answered regretfully.
"Afraid?"
"Your father and mother...."
"Would you if I were left an orphan?"
"Of course I would, but you mustn't say things like that even in
joke."
Gladys poured me out a cup of tea and extended a cream jug at a
menacing angle.
"Not for worlds if it's China," I exclaimed.
"It is. Uncle Toby...." She seemed to hesitate over the name, but I
prefer it to Simon and bowed encouragement, "I'm going to be an orphan
in three days' time. At least, it's that or very sea-sick."
I begged for an explanation. It appeared that Pont Street was in
domestic convulsion over the health of Mr. Justice Merivale. As Roden
had hinted, a succession of militant outrages directed against his
person and property, not to mention threatening letters and attempted
violence, had seriously shaken his nerve. Under doctor's orders he
was leaving England for a short sea cruise as soon as the Courts rose
at Whitsun.
"He's only going to Marseilles and back," she explained. "Mother's
going with him, and something's got to be done with me. I don't want
to make a nuisance of myself, but I should simply die if they tried to
take me through the Bay."
"Do you think they'd trust me?" I asked. From an early age my brother
has regarded me as the Black Sheep of an otherwise irreproachable
family of two.
"They'd jump at it!" Irreverently I tried to visualise Brian jumping.
"The Rodens wanted me to go to them, but it wouldn't be fair on
Sylvia. She'd be tied to me the whole time."
"I can imagine worse fates."
"For her? or for me?"
"Either or both."
"I'll tell her. Did you see her driving away as you arrived? If you'll
adopt me, I'll introduce you."
"I've arranged that already. Whitsuntide will be spent at Brandon
Court improving my acquaintance with her."
Gladys regarded me with frank admiration.
"You haven't wasted much time. But if you're going there, you may just
as well adopt me. I shall be down there too, and if you're my
guardian...."
"It'll save all trouble with the luggage. Well, it's for your parents
to decide. You can guess my feelings."
I waited till after six in the hopes of seeing my brother, and was
then only allowed to depart on the plea of my engagement with Aintree
and a promise to dine and arrange details of my stewardship the
following night.
"Write it down!" Gladys implored me as I hastened downstairs. "You'll
only forget it if you don't. Eight-fifteen to-morrow. Haven't you got
a book?"
I explained that on the fringe of the desert where I had lived of
late, social engagements were not too numerous to be carried in the
head.
"That won't do for London," she said with much firmness, and I was
incontinently burdened with a leather pocket-diary.
Dressing for dinner that night, the little leather diary made me
reflective. As a very young man I used to keep a journal: it belonged
to a time when I was not too old to give myself unnecessary trouble,
nor too disillusioned to appreciate the unimportance of my impressions
or the ephemeral character of the names that figured in its pages. For
a single moment I played with the idea of recording my experiences in
England. Now that the last chapter is closed and the little diary is
one of the bare half-dozen memorials of my checkered sojourn in
England, I half wish I had not been too lazy to carry my idea into
effect. After a lapse of only seven months I find there are many minor
points already forgotten. The outline is clear enough in my memory,
but the details are blurred, and the dates are in riotous confusion.
It is fruitless to waste regrets over a lost opportunity, but I wish I
had started my journal on the day Gladys presented me with my now
shabby little note-book. I should have written "Prologue" against this
date--to commemorate my meetings with Roden and Joyce Davenant,
Aintree and Mrs. Wylton, Gladys and Philip. To commemorate, too, my
first glimpse of Sylvia....
Yes, I should have written "Prologue" against this date: and then
natural indolence would have tempted me to pack my bag and wander
abroad once more, if I could have foreseen for one moment the turmoil
and excitement of the following six months.
I can only add that I am extremely glad I did no such thing.
CHAPTER I
WAR À OUTRANCE
"RIDGEON: I have a curious aching; I dont know where; I
cant localise it. Sometimes I think it's my heart;
sometimes I suspect my spine. It doesn't exactly hurt me,
but it unsettles me completely. I feel that something is
going to happen....
SIR PATRICK: You are sure there are no voices?
RIDGEON: Quite sure.
SIR PATRICK: Then it's only foolishness.
RIDGEON: Have you ever met anything like it before in your
practice?
SIR PATRICK: Oh yes. Often. It's very common between the
ages of seventeen and twenty-two. It sometimes comes on
again at forty or thereabouts. You're a bachelor, you see.
It's not serious--if you're careful.
RIDGEON: About my food?
SIR PATRICK: No; about your behaviour.... Youre not going
to die; but you may be going to make a fool of yourself."
BERNARD SHAW: "The Doctor's Dilemma."
I was a few minutes late for dinner, as a guest should be. Aintree had
quite properly arrived before me, and was standing in the lounge of
the Ritz talking to two slim, fair-haired women, with very white skin
and very blue eyes. I have spent so much of my time in the East and
South that this light colouring has almost faded from my memory. I
associated it exclusively with England, and in time began to fancy it
must be an imagination of my boyhood. The English blondes you meet
returning from India by P & O are usually so bleached and dried by
the sun that you find yourself doubting whether the truly golden hair
and forget-me-not eyes of your dreams are ever discoverable in real
life. But the fascination endures even when you suspect you are
cherishing an illusion.
I had been wondering, as I drove down, whether any trace survived of
the two dare-devil, fearless, riotous children I had seen by
flashlight glimpses, when an invitation from old Jasper Davenant
brought me to participate in one of his amazing Cumberland shoots. I
was twenty or twenty-one at the time; Elsie must have been seven, and
Joyce five. Mrs. Davenant was alive in those days, and Dick still
unborn. My memory of the two children is a misty confusion of cut
hands, broken knees, torn clothes, and daily whippings. Jasper wanted
to make fine animals of his children, and set them to swim as soon as
they could walk, and to hunt as soon as their fingers were large
enough to hold a rein.
When I was climbing with him in Trans-Caucasia, I asked how the young
draft was shaping. That was ten years later, and I gathered that Elsie
was beginning to be afraid of being described as a tomboy. On such a
subject Joyce was quite indifferent. She attended her first hunt ball
at twelve, against orders and under threat of castigation; half the
hunt broke their backs in bending down to dance with her, as soon as
they had got over the surprise of seeing a short-frocked,
golden-haired fairy marching into the ball-room and defying her father
to send her home. "You know the consequences?" he had said with
pathetic endeavour to preserve parental authority. "I think it's worth
it," was her answer. That night the Master interceded with old Jasper
to save Joyce her whipping, and the next morning saw an attempt to
establish order without recourse to the civil hand. "I'll let you off
this time," Jasper had said, "if you'll promise not to disobey me
again." "Not good enough," was Joyce's comment with grave deliberate
shake of the head. "Then I shall have to flog you." "I think you'd
better. You said you would, and you'd make me feel mean if you didn't.
I've had my fun."
The words might be taken for the Davenant motto, in substitution of
the present "Vita brevis." Gay and gallant, half savage, half
moss-rider, lawless and light-hearted, they would stick at nothing to
compass the whim of the moment, and come up for judgment with
uncomplaining faces on the day of inevitable retribution. Joyce had
run away from two schools because the Christmas term clashed with the
hunting. I never heard the reason why she was expelled from a third;
but I have no doubt it was adequate. She would ride anything that had
a back, drive anything that had a bit or steering-wheel, thrash a
poacher with her own hand, and take or offer a bet at any hour of the
day or night. That was the character her father gave her. I had seen
and heard little of the family since his death, Elsie's marriage and
Joyce's abrupt, marauding descent on Oxford, where she worked twelve
hours a day for three years, secured two firsts, and brought her name
before the public as a writer of political pamphlets, and a pioneer in
the suffrage agitation.
"We really oughtn't to need introduction," said Mrs. Wylton, as
Aintree brought me up to be presented. "I remember you quite well. I
shouldn't think you've altered a bit. How long is it?"
"Twenty years," I said. "You have--grown, rather."
She had grown staider and sadder, as well as older; but the bright
golden hair, white skin, and blue eyes were the same as I remembered
in Cumberland. A black dress clung closely to her slim, tall figure,
and a rope of pearls was her only adornment.
I turned and shook hands with Joyce, marvelling at the likeness
between the two sisters. There was no rope of pearls, only a thin band
of black velvet round the neck. Joyce was dressed in white silk, and
wore malmaisons at her waist. Those, you would say, were the only
differences--until time granted you a closer scrutiny, and you saw
that Elsie was a Joyce who had passed through the fire. Something of
her courage had been scorched and withered in the ordeal; my pity went
out to her as we met. Joyce demanded another quality than pity. I
hardly know what to call it--homage, allegiance, devotion. She
impressed me, as not half a dozen people have impressed me in this
life--Rhodes, Chamberlain, and one or two more--with the feeling that
I was under the dominion of one who had always had her way, and would
always have it; one who came armed with a plan and a purpose among
straying sheep who awaited her lead.... And with it all she was
twenty-eight, and looked less; smiling, soft and childlike; so slim
and fragile that you might snap her across your knee like a lath rod.
Aintree and Mrs. Wylton led the way into the dining-room.
"I can't honestly say I remember you," Joyce remarked as we prepared
to follow. "I was too young when you went away. I suppose we _did_
meet?"
"The last time I heard of you...." I began.
"Oh, don't!" she interrupted with a laugh. "You must have heard some
pretty bad things. You know, people won't meet me now. I'm a.... Wait
a bit--'A disgrace to my family,' 'a traitor to my class,' 'a reproach
to my upbringing!' I've 'drilled incendiary lawlessness into a
compact, organised force,' I'm 'an example of acute militant
hysteria.' Heaven knows what else! D'you still feel equal to dining at
the same table? It's brave of you; that boy in front--he's too good
for this world--he's the only non-political friend I've got. I'm
afraid you'll find me dreadfully changed--that is, if we ever did
meet."
"As I was saying...."
"Yes, and I interrupted! I'm so sorry. You drop into the habit of
interrupting if you're a militant. As you were saying, the last time
we met...."
"The last time we met, strictly speaking we didn't meet at all. I came
to say good-bye, but you'd just discovered that a pony was necessary
to your happiness. It was an _idée fixe_, you were a fanatic, you
broke half a Crown Derby dinner-service when you couldn't get it. When
I came to say good-bye, you were locked in the nursery with an
insufficient allowance of bread and water."
Joyce shook her head sadly.
"I was an awful child."
"Was?"
She looked up with reproach in her blue eyes.
"Haven't I improved?"
"You were a wonderfully pretty child."
"Oh, never mind looks!"
"But I do. They're the only things worth having."
"They're not enough."
"Leave that to be said by the women who haven't any."
"In any case they don't last."
"And while they do, you slight them."
"I? They're far too useful!" She paused at the door of the dining-room
to survey her reflection in the mirror; then turned to me with a slow,
childlike smile. "I think I'm looking rather nice to-night."
"You looked nice twenty years ago. Not content with that, you broke a
dinner-service to get a pony."
"Fancy your remembering that all these years!"
"I was reminded of it the moment I saw you. _Plus ça change, plus
c'est la même chose._ You are still not content with looking extremely
nice, you _must_ break a dinner-service now and again."
Joyce raised her eyebrows, and patiently stated a self-evident
proposition.
"I must have a thing if I think I've a right to it," she pouted.
"You were condemned to bread and water twenty years ago to convince
you of your error."
"I get condemned to that now."
"Dull eating, isn't it?"
"I don't know. I've never tried."
"You did then?"
"I threw it out of the window, plate and all."
We threaded our way through to a table at the far side of the room.
"Indeed you've not changed," I said. "You might still be that wilful
child of five that I remember so well."
"You've forgotten one thing about me," she answered.
"What's that?"
"I got the pony," she replied with a mischievous laugh.
How far the others enjoyed that dinner, I cannot say. Aintree was an
admirable host, and made a point of seeing that every one had too much
to eat and drink; to the conversation he contributed as little as Mrs.
Wylton. I did not know then how near the date of the divorce was
approaching. Both sat silent and reflective, one overshadowed by the
Past, the other by the Future: on the opposite side of the table,
living and absorbed in the Present, typifying it and luxuriating in
its every moment, was Joyce Davenant. I, too, contrive to live in the
present, if by that you mean squeezing the last drop of enjoyment out
of each sunny day's pleasure and troubling my head as little about the
future as the past....
I made Joyce tell me her version of the suffrage war; it was like
dipping into the memoirs of a prescribed Girondist. She had written
and spoken, debated and petitioned. When an obdurate Parliament told
her there was no real demand for the vote among women themselves, she
had organised great peaceful demonstrations and "marches past": when
sceptics belittled her processions and said you could persuade any one
to sign any petition in favour of anything, she had massed a
determined army in Parliament Square, raided the House and broken into
the Prime Minister's private room.
The raid was followed by short terms of imprisonment for the
ringleaders. Joyce came out of Holloway, blithe and unrepentant, and
hurried from a congratulatory luncheon to an afternoon meeting at the
Albert Hall, and from that to the first round of the heckling
campaign. For six months no Minister could address a meeting without
the certainty of persistent interruption, and no sooner had it been
decided first to admit only such women as were armed with tickets, and
then no women at all, than the country was flung into the throes of a
General Election, and the Militants sought out every uncertain
Ministerial constituency and threw the weight of their influence into
the scale of the Opposition candidate.
Joyce told me of the papers they had founded and the bills they had
promoted. The heckling of Ministers at unsuspected moments was reduced
to a fine art: the whole sphere of their activities seemed governed by
an almost diabolical ingenuity and resourcefulness. I heard of fresh
terms of imprisonment, growing longer as the public temper warmed; the
institution of the Hunger Strike, the counter move of Forcible
Feeding, a short deadlock, and at last the promulgation of the "Cat
and Mouse" Bill.
I was not surprised to hear some of the hardest fighting had been
against over-zealous, misdirected allies. It cannot be said too often
that Joyce herself would stick at nothing--fire, flood or dynamite--to
secure what she conceived to be her rights. But if vitriol had to be
thrown, she would see that it fell into the eyes of the right,
responsible person: in her view it was worse than useless to attempt
pressure on A by breaking B's windows. She had stood severely aloof
from the latter developments of militancy, and refused to lend her
countenance to the idly exasperating policy of injuring treasures of
art, interrupting public races, breaking non-combatants' windows and
burning down unique, priceless houses.
"Where do you stand now?" I asked as dinner drew to a close. "I
renewed my acquaintance with Arthur Roden to-day, and he invited me
down to the House to assist at the final obsequies of the Militant
movement."
Joyce shook her head dispassionately over the ingrained stupidity of
mankind.
"I think it's silly to talk like that before the battle's over. Don't
you?"
"He seemed quite certain of the result."
"Napoleon was so certain that he was going to invade England that he
had medals struck to commemorate the capture of London. I've got one
at home. I'd rather like to send it him, only it 'ud look flippant."
I reminded her that she had not answered my question.
"Roden says that the 'Cat and Mouse' Act has killed the law-breakers,"
I told her, "and to-night's division is going to kill the
constitutionalists. What are you going to do?"
Joyce turned to me with profound solemnity, sat for a moment with her
head on one side, and then allowed a smile to press its way through
the serious mask. As I watched the eyes softening and the cheeks
breaking into dimples, I appreciated the hopelessness of trying to be
serious with a fanatic who only made fun of her enemies.
"What would _you_ do?" she asked.
"Give it up," I answered. "Yield to _force majeure_. I've lived long
enough in the East to feel the beauty and usefulness of resignation."
"But if we _won't_ give it up?"
I shrugged my shoulders.
"What _can_ you do?"
"I'm inviting suggestions. You're a man, so I thought you'd be sure to
be helpful. Of course we've got our own plan, and when the
Amendment's rejected to-night, you'll be able to buy a copy of the
first number of a new paper to-morrow morning. It's called the _New
Militant_, only a penny, and really worth reading. I've written most
of it myself. And then we're going to start a fresh militant campaign,
rather ingenious, and directed against the real obstructionists. No
more window-breaking or house-burning, but real serious fighting, just
where it will hurt them most. Something must come of it," she
concluded. "I hope it may not be blood."
Aintree roused himself from his attitude of listless indifference.
"You'll gain nothing by militancy," he pronounced. "I've no axe to
grind, you may have the vote or go without it. You may take mine away,
or give me two. But your cause has gone back steadily, ever since you
adopted militant tactics."
"The Weary Seraph cares for none of these things," Joyce remarked. I
requested a moment's silence to ponder the exquisite fitness of the
name. Had I thought for a year I could not have found a better
description for the shy boy with the alert face and large frightened
eyes. "Every one calls him that," Joyce went on. "And he doesn't like
it. I should love to be called seraphic, but no one will; I'm too full
of original sin. Well, Seraph, you may disapprove of militancy if you
like, but you must suggest something to put in its place."
"I don't know that I can."
Joyce turned to her sister.
"These men-things aren't helpful, are they, Elsie?"
"I'm a good destructive critic," I said in self-justification.
"There are so many without you," Joyce answered, laying her hand on
my arm. "Listen, Mr. Merivale. You've probably noticed there's very
little argument about the suffrage; everything that can be said on
either side has already been said a thousand times. You're going to
refuse us the vote. Good. I should do the same in your place. There
are more of us than there are of you, and we shall swamp you if we all
get the vote. You can't give it to some of us and not others, because
the brain is not yet born that can think of a perfect partial
franchise. Will you give it to property and leave out the factory
workers? Will you give it to spinsters and leave out the women who
bear children to the nation? Will you give it to married women and
leave out the unprotected spinsters? It's all or none: I say all, you
say none. You say I'm not fit for a vote, I say I am. We reach an
impasse, and might argue till daybreak without getting an inch further
forward. We're fighting to swamp you, you're fighting to keep your
head above water. We're reduced to a trial of strength."
She leant back in her chair, and I presented her with a dish of salted
almonds, partly as a reward, partly because I never eat them myself.
"I admire your summary of the situation," I said. "You've only omitted
one point. In a trial of strength between man and woman, man is still
the stronger."
"And woman the more resourceful."
"Perhaps."
"She's certainly the more ruthless," Joyce answered, as she finished
her coffee and drew on her gloves.
"War _à outrance_," I commented as we left the dining-room. "And what
after the war?"
"When we've got the vote...." she began.
"Napoleon and the capture of London," I murmured.
"Oh well, you don't think I go in for a thing unless I'm going to win,
do you? When we get the vote, we shall work to secure as large a share
of public life as men enjoy, and we shall put women on an equality
with men in things like divorce," she added between closed teeth.
"Suppose for the sake of argument you're beaten? I imagine even Joyce
Davenant occasionally meets with little checks?"
"Oh yes. When Joyce was seven, she wanted to go skating, and her
father said the ice wouldn't bear and she mustn't go. Joyce went, and
fell in and nearly got drowned. And when she got home, her father was
very angry and whipped her with a crop."
"Well?"
"That's all. Only--he said afterwards that she took it rather well,
there was no crying."
I wondered then, as I have always wondered, whether she in any way
appreciated the seriousness of the warfare she was waging on society.
"A month in the second division at Holloway is one thing...." I began.
"It'll be seven years' penal servitude if I'm beaten," she
interrupted. Her tone was innocent alike of flippancy and bravado.
"Forty votes aren't worth that. I've got three, so I ought to know."
Joyce's eyes turned in the direction of her sister who was coming out
of the dining-room with Aintree.
"_She's_ worth some sacrifice."
"You couldn't make her lot easier if you had every vote in creation.
She's up against the existing divorce law, and that's buttressed by
every Church, and every dull married woman in the country. You're
starting conversation at the wrong end, Joyce."
Her little arched eyebrows raised themselves at the name.
"Joyce?" she repeated.
"You were Joyce when last we met."
"That was twenty years ago."
"It seems less. I should like to blot out those years."
"And have me back in nursery frocks and long hair?"
"Better than long convict frocks and short hair," I answered with
laborious antithesis.
"Then I haven't improved?"
"You're perfect--off duty, in private life."
"I have no private life."
"I've seen a glimpse of it to-night."
"An hour's holiday. I say good-bye to it for good this evening when I
say good-bye to you."
"But not for good?"
"You'll not want the burden of my friendship when war's declared. If
you like to come in as an ally...?"
"Do you think you could convert me?"
She looked at me closely.
"Yes."
I shook my head.
"What'd you bet?" she challenged me.
"It would be like robbing a child's money-box," I answered. "You're
dealing with the laziest man in the northern hemisphere."
"How long will you be in England?"
"I've no idea."
"Six months? In six months I'll make you the Prince Rupert of the
militant army. Then when we're sent to prison--Sir Arthur Roden's a
friend of yours--you can arrange for our cells to be side by side, and
we'll tap on the dividing wall."
I had an idea that our unsociable prison discipline insisted on
segregating male and female offenders. It was not the moment, however,
for captious criticism.
"If I stay six months," I said, "I'll undertake to divorce you from
your militant army."
"The laziest man in the northern hemisphere?"
"I've never found anything worth doing before."
"It's a poor ambition. And the militants want me."
"They haven't the monopoly of that."
Joyce smiled in spite of herself, and under her breath I caught the
word "Cheek!"
"I'm pledged to them," she said aloud. "Possession's nine points of
the law."
"I don't expect to hear _you_ calling the law and the prophets in
aid."
"It's a woman's privilege to make the best of both worlds," she
answered, as Elsie carried her off to fetch their cloaks.
"There is only one world," I called out as she left me. "This is it. I
am going to make the best of it."
"How?"
"By appropriating to myself whatever's worth having in it."
"How?" she repeated.
"I'll tell you in six months' time."
Aintree sauntered up with his coat under his arm as Joyce and her
sister vanished from sight.
"Rather wonderful, isn't she?" he remarked.
"Which?" I asked.
"Oh, really!" he exclaimed in disgusted protest.
"They are astonishingly alike," I said _à propos_ of nothing.
"They're often mistaken for each other."
"I can well believe it."
"It's a mistake you're not likely to make," he answered significantly.
I took hold of his shoulders, and made him look me in the eyes.
"What do you mean by that, Seraph?" I asked.
"Nothing," he answered. "What did I say? I really forget; I was
thinking what a wife Joyce would make for a man who likes having his
mind made up for him, and feels that his youth is slipping
imperceptibly away."
I made no answer, because I could not see what answer was possible.
And, further, I was playing with a day-dream.... The Seraph
interrupted with some remark about her effect on a public meeting, and
my mind set itself to visualise the scene. I could imagine her easy
directness and gay self-confidence capturing the heart of her
audience; it mattered little how she spoke or what she ordered them to
do; the fascination lay in her happy, untroubled voice, and the
graceful movements of her slim, swaying body. Behind the careless
front they knew of her resolute, unwhimpering courage; she tossed the
laws of England in the air as a juggler tosses glass balls, and when
one fell to the ground and shivered in a thousand pieces she was ready
to pay the price with a smiling face, and a hand waving gay farewell.
It was the lighthearted recklessness of Sydney Carton or Rupert of
Hentzau, the one courage that touches the brutal, beef-fed English
imagination....
"Why the hell does she do it, Seraph?" I exclaimed.
"Why don't you stop her, if you don't like it?"
"What influence have _I_ got over her?"
"Some--not much. You can develop it. I? Good heavens, _I_'ve no
control. You've got the seeds.... No, you must just believe me when I
say it is so. You wouldn't understand if I told you the reason."
"It seems to me the more I see of you the less I do understand you," I
objected.
"Quite likely," he answered. "It isn't even worth trying."
The play which the Seraph was taking us to see was _The Heir-at-Law_,
and though we went on the first night, it was running throughout my
residence in England, and for anything I know to the contrary may
still be playing to crowded houses. It was the biggest dramatic
success of recent years, and for technical construction, subtlety of
characterization, and brilliance of dialogue, ranks deservedly as a
masterpiece. As a young man I used to do a good deal of theatre-going,
and attended most of the important first nights. Why, I hardly know;
possibly because there was a good deal of difficulty in getting seats,
possibly because at that age it amused us to pose as _virtuosi_, and
say we liked to form our own opinion of a play before the critics had
had time to tell us what to think of it. I remember the acting usually
had an appearance of being insufficiently rehearsed, the players were
often nervous and inaudible, and most of the plays themselves wanted
substantial cutting.
"The last things I saw in England," I told Mrs. Wylton, "were _The
Second Mrs. Tanqueray_, and _A Woman of No Importance_."
Dramatic history has developed apace since those days. I recollect we
thought Pinero the most daring dramatist since Ibsen; we talked sagely
of a revolution in the English theatre. There must have been many
revolutions since then! Even the wit of Wilde has grown a little
out-moded since '93. As we drove down to the Cornmarket I was given to
understand that the dramatic firmament had been many times disturbed
in twenty years; Shaw had followed a meteoric path, Barker burned with
fitful brilliance, while aloft in splendid isolation shone the
inexorable cold light of Galsworthy....
"Who's the new man you're taking us to see?" Joyce asked the Seraph.
"Gordon Tremayne," he answered.
"The man who wrote 'The Child of Misery'? I didn't know he wrote
plays."
"I believe this is his first. Do you know his books?"
"Forward and backward and upside down," I answered. "He's one of the
coming men."
I am not a great novel reader, and have no idea how I came across
Tremayne's first book, "The Marriage of Gretchen," but when once I had
read it, I watched the publisher's announcements for other books from
the same pen. The second one belonged still to the experimental stage:
then the whole literary world was convulsed by the first volume of his
"Child of Misery."
I suppose by now it is as well-known as that other strange masterpiece
of self-revelation--"Jean Christophe"--which in many ways it so
closely resembles. In one respect it shared the same immortality, and
"Jean Christophe's" future was not more eagerly watched in France than
"Rupert Chevasse's" in England. The hero--for want of a better
name--was torn from the pages of the book and invested by his readers
with flesh and blood reality. We all wanted to know how the theme
would develop, and none of us could guess. The first volume gave you
the childhood and upbringing of Rupert--and incidentally revealed to
my unimaginative mind what a hell life must be for an over-sensitive
boy at an English public school. The second opened with his marriage
to Kathleen, went on to her death and ended with the appalling mental
prostration of Rupert. I suppose every one had a different theory how
the third volume would shape....
"What sort of a fellow is this Tremayne?" I asked the Seraph.
"I've never met him," he answered, and closured my next question by
jumping up and helping Mrs. Wylton out of the taxi.
From our box we had an admirable view of both stage and house. One or
two critics and a sprinkling of confirmed first-nighters had survived
from the audiences I knew twenty years before, but the newcomers were
in the ascendant. It was a good house, and I recognised more than one
quondam acquaintance. Mrs. Rawnsley, the Prime Minister's wife, was
pointed out to me by Joyce: she was there with her daughter, and for a
moment I thought I ought to go and speak. When I recollected that we
had not met since her marriage, and thought of the voluminous
explanations that would be necessitated, I decided to sit on in the
box and talk to Joyce. Indeed, I only mention the fact of my seeing
mother and daughter there, because it sometimes strikes me as curious
that so large a part should have been played in my life by a girl of
nineteen with sandy hair and over-freckled face whom I saw on that
occasion for the first, last and only time.
_The Heir-at-Law_ went with a fine swing. There were calls at the end
of each act, and the lights were kept low after the final curtain
while the whole house rang from pit to gallery with a chorus of
"Author! Author!" The Seraph began looking for his coat as soon as the
curtain fell, but I wanted to see the great Gordon Tremayne.
"He won't appear," I was told when I refused to move.
"How do you know?"
Aintree hesitated, and then pointed to the stage, where the manager
had advanced to the footlights and was explaining that the author was
not in the house.
We struggled out into the passage and made our way into the hall.
"Where does one sup these times?" I asked the Seraph.
He suggested the Carlton and I handed on the suggestion to Mrs.
Wylton, not in any way as a reflection on his admirable dinner, but as
a precautionary measure against hunger in the night. Mrs. Wylton in
turn consulted her sister, who appeared by common consent to be
credited with the dominant mind of the party.
"I should love...." Joyce was beginning when something made her stop
short. I followed the direction of her eyes, and caught sight of a
wretched newspaper boy approaching with the last edition of an evening
paper. Against his legs flapped a flimsy newsbill, and on the bill
were four gigantic words:--
DEFEAT OF SUFFRAGE AMENDMENT.
Joyce met my eyes with a determined little smile.
"Not to-night, thanks," she said. "I've a lot of work to do before I
go to bed."
"When shall I see you again?" I asked.
She held out a small gloved hand.
"You won't. It's good-bye."
"But why?"
"It's war _à outrance_."
"That's no concern of mine."
"Exactly. Those that are not with me are against me."
I offered a bribe in the form of matches and a cigarette.
"Don't you have an armistice even for tea?" I asked.
She shook her head provokingly.
"Joyce," I said, "when you were five, I had every reason,
justification and opportunity for slapping you. I refrained. Now when
I think of my wasted chances...."
"You can come to tea any time. Seraph'll give you the address."
"That's a better frame of mind," I said, as I hailed a taxi and put
the two women inside it.
"It won't be an armistice," she called back over her shoulder.
"It'll have to be. I bring peace wherever I go."
"I shall convert you."
"If there's any conversion...."
"When are you coming?" she interrupted.
"Not for a day or two," I answered regretfully. "I'm spending Whitsun
with the Rodens."
Joyce shook my hand in silence through the window of the taxi, and
then abruptly congratulated me.
"What on?" I asked.
"Your week-end party. How perfectly glorious!"
"Why?"
"You're going to be in at the death," she answered, as the taxi jerked
itself epileptically away from the kerb.
CHAPTER II
SUPPER WITH A MYSTIC
"I can look into your soul. D'you know what I see...? ...
I see your soul."--JOHN MASEFIELD, "The Tragedy of Nan."
I stood absent-mindedly staring at the back of the taxi till it
disappeared down Pall Mall and the Seraph brought me to earth with an
invitation to supper.
"...if it won't be too much of an anti-climax to have supper with me
alone," I heard him murmuring.
At that moment I wanted to stride away to the Park, tramp up and down
by myself, and think--think calmly, think savagely, try every fashion
of thinking.
"To be quite candid," I said, as I linked arms and turned in the
direction of the Club, "if you nailed me down like a Strasburg goose,
I don't believe you could fill me fuller than you've already done at
dinner."
"Let me bear you company, then. It'll keep you from thinking. Wait a
minute; I want to have this prescription made up."
I followed him into a chemist's shop and waited patiently while a
powerful soporific was compounded. I have myself subsisted too many
years on heroic remedies to retain the average Englishman's horror of
what he calls "drugs." At the same time I do not like to see boys of
six and twenty playing with toys as dangerous as the Seraph's little
grey-white powders; nor do I like to see them so much as feeling the
need.
"Under advice?" I asked, as we came out into the street.
"Originally. I don't need it often, but I'm rather unsettled
to-night."
He had been restless throughout the play, and the hand that paid for
the powders had trembled more than was necessary.
"You were all right at dinner," I said.
"That was some time ago," he answered.
"Everything went off admirably; there's been nothing to worry you."
"Reaction," he muttered abruptly, as we mounted the steps of the Club.
Supper was a gloomy meal, as we ate in silence and had the whole huge
dining-room to ourselves. I ought not to complain or be surprised, as
silence was the Seraph's normal state, and my mind was far too full of
other things to discuss the ordinary banalities of the day. With the
arrival of the cigars, however, I began to feel unsociable, and told
him to talk to me.
"What about?" he asked.
"Anything."
"There's only one thing you're thinking about at the moment."
"Oh?"
"You're thinking of the past three months generally, and the past
three hours in particular."
"That doesn't carry me very far," I said.
He switched off the table lights and lay back in his chair with legs
crossed.
"Don't you think it strange and--unsettling? Three months ago life
was rounded and complete; you were all-sufficient to yourself. One day
was just like another, till the morning when you woke up and felt
lonely--lonely and wasted, gradually growing old. Till three, four
hours ago you tried to define your new hunger.... Now you've forgotten
it, now you're wondering why you can't drive out of your mind the
vision of a girl you've not seen for twenty years. Shall I go on?
You've just had a new thought; you were thinking I was impertinent,
that I oughtn't to talk like this, that you ought to be angry.... Then
you decided you couldn't be, because I was right." He paused, and then
exclaimed quickly, "Now, now there's another new thought! You're not
going to be angry, you know it's true, you're interested, you want to
find out how I know it's true, but you want to seem sceptical so as to
save your face." He hesitated a second time, and added quietly, "Now
you've made up your mind, you're going to say nothing, you think
that's non-committal, you're going to wait in the hope that I shall
tell you how I know."
I made no answer, and he sat silent for a while, tracing his initials
with the end of a match in the little mound of cigar ash on his plate.
"I can't tell you how I know," he said at last. "But it was true,
wasn't it?"
"Suppose it was?"
His shoulders gave a slight shrug.
"Oh, I don't know. I just wanted to see if I was right."
I turned up the table lamp again so that I could see his face.
"Just as a matter of personal interest," I said, "do you suggest that
I always show the world what I'm thinking about?"
"Not the world."
"You?"
"As a rule. Not more than other people."
"Can you tell what everybody's thinking of?"
"I can with a good many men."
"Not women?"
He shook his head.
"They often don't know themselves. They think in fits and
starts--jerkily; it's hard to follow them."
"How do you do it?"
"I don't know. You must watch people's eyes; then you'll find the
expression is always changing, never the same for two minutes in
succession--you just _see_."
"I'm hanged if I do."
"Your eyes must be quick. Look here, you're walking along in evening
dress, and I throw a lump of mud on to your shirt front. In a fraction
of a second you hit me over the head with your cane. That's all, isn't
it? But you know it isn't all; there are a dozen mental processes
between the mud-throwing and the head-hitting. You're horror-stricken
at the mess I've made of your shirt, you wonder if you'll have time to
go back and change into a clean one, and if so, how late you'll be.
You're annoyed that any one should throw mud at you, you're
flabbergasted that _I_ should be the person. You're impotently angry.
Gradually a desire for revenge overcomes every other feeling; you're
going to hurt me. A little thought springs up, and you wonder whether
I shall summon you for assault; you decide to risk it Another little
thought--will you hit me on the body or the head? You decide the head
because it'll hurt more. Still another thought--how hard to hit? You
don't want to kill me and you don't want to make me blind. You decide
to be on the safe side and hit rather gently. Then--then at last
you're ready with the cane. Is that right?"
I thought it over very carefully.
"I suppose so. But no one can see those thoughts succeeding each
other. There isn't time."
The Seraph shook his head in polite contradiction.
"The same sort of thing was said when instantaneous photography was
introduced. You got pictures of horses galloping, and people solemnly
assured you it was physically impossible for horses' legs to get into
such attitudes."
"How do you account for it?" I asked.
"Don't know. Eyes different from other people's, I suppose."
I could see he preferred to discuss the power in the abstract rather
than in relation to himself, but my curiosity was piqued.
"Anything else?" I asked.
He listened for a moment; the Club was sunk in profound silence. Then
I heard him imitating a familiar deep voice: "Oh--er--porter, taxi,
please."
"Why d'you do that?" I asked, not quite certain of his meaning.
"Don't you know whose voice that was supposed to be?"
"It was Arthur Roden's," I said.
He nodded. "Just leaving the Club."
I jumped up and ran into the hall.
"Is Sir Arthur Roden in the Club?" I asked the porter.
"Just left this moment, sir," he answered.
I came back and sat down opposite the Seraph.
"I want to hear more about this," I said. "I'm beginning to get
interested."
He shook his head.
"Why not?" I persisted.
"I don't like talking about it. I don't understand it, there's a lot
more that I haven't told you about. I only----"
"Well?"
"I only told you this much because you didn't like to see me taking
drugs. I wanted to show you my nerves were rather--abnormal."
"As if I didn't know that! Why don't you do something for them?"
"Such as?"
"Occupy your mind more."
"My mind's about as fully occupied as it will stand," he answered as
we left the dining-room and went in search of our coats.
As I was staying at the Savoy and he was living in Adelphi Terrace,
our homeward roads were the same. We started in silence, and before we
had gone five yards I knew the grey-white powder would be called in
aid that night. He was in a state of acute nervous excitement; the arm
that linked itself in mine trembled appreciably through two
thicknesses of coat, and I could feel him pressing against my side
like a frightened woman. Once he begged me not to repeat our recent
conversation.
As we entered the Strand, the sight of the theatres gave me a fresh
train of thought.
"You ought to write a book, Seraph," I said with the easy abruptness
one employs in advancing these general propositions.
"What about?"
"Anything. Novel, play, psychological study. Look here, my young
friend, psychology in literature is the power of knowing what's going
on in people's minds, and being able to communicate that knowledge to
paper. How many writers possess the power? If you look at the rot that
gets published, the rot that gets produced at the theatres, my
question answers itself. At the present day there aren't six
psychologists above the mediocre in all England; barring Henry James
there's been no great psychologist since Dostoievski. And this power
that other people attain by years of heart-breaking labour and
observation, comes to you--by some freak of nature--ready made. You
could write a good book, Seraph; why don't you?"
"I might try."
"I know what that means."
"I don't think you do," he answered. "I pay a lot of attention to your
advice."
"Thank you," I said with an ironical bow.
"I do. Five years ago, in Morocco, you gave me the same advice."
"I'm still waiting to see the result."
"You've seen it."
"What do you mean?"
"You told me to write a book, I wrote it. You've read it."
"In my sleep?"
"I hope not."
"Name, please? I've never so much as seen the outside of it."
"I didn't write in my own name."
"Name of book and pseudonym?" I persisted.
His lips opened, and then shut in silence.
"I shan't tell you," he murmured after a pause.
"It won't go any further," I promised.
"I don't want even you to know."
"Seraph, we've got no secrets. At least I hope not."
We had come alongside the entrance to the Savoy, but neither of us
thought of turning in.
"Name, please?" I repeated after we had walked in silence to the
Wellington Street crossing and were waiting for a stream of traffic
to pass on towards Waterloo Bridge.
"'The Marriage of Gretchen,'" he answered.
"'The History of David Copperfield,'" I suggested.
"You see, you won't believe me," he complained.
"Try something a little less well--known: get hold of a book that's
been published anonymously."
"'Gretchen' was published over a _nom de plume_."
"By 'Gordon Tremayne,'" I said, "whoever he may be."
"You don't know him?"
"Do you? No, I remember as we drove down to the theatre you said you
didn't."
"I said I'd never met him," he corrected me.
"A mere quibble," I protested.
"It's an important distinction. Do you know anybody who _has_ met
him?"
I turned half round to give him the benefit of what was intended for a
smile of incredulity. He met my gaze unfalteringly. Suddenly it was
borne in upon me that he was speaking the truth.
"Will you kindly explain the whole mystery?" I begged.
"Now you can understand why I was jumpy at the theatre to-night," he
answered in parenthesis.
He told me the story as we walked along Fleet Street, and we had
reached Ludgate Circus and turned down New Bridge Street before the
fantastic tangle was straightened out.
Acting on the advice I had given him when he stayed with me in
Morocco, he had sought mental distraction in the composition of
"Gretchen," and had offered it to the publishers under an assumed name
through the medium of a solicitor. We three alone were acquainted with
the carefully guarded secret. His subsequent books appeared in the
same way: even the _Heir-at-Law_ I had just witnessed came to a
similar cumbrous birth, and was rehearsed and produced without
criticism or suggestion from the author.
I could see no reason for a _nom de plume_ in the case of "Gretchen"
or the other novel of nonage; with the "Child of Misery" it was
different. I suspect the first volume of being autobiographical; the
second, to my certain knowledge, embodies a slice torn ruthlessly out
of the Seraph's own life. An altered setting, the marriage of Rupert
and Kathleen, were two out of a dozen variations from the actual; but
the touching, idyllic boy and girl romance, with its shattering
termination, had taken place a few months--a few weeks, I might
say--before our first meeting in Morocco. I imagine it was because I
was the only man who had seen him in those dark days, that he broke
through his normal reserve and admitted me to his confidence.
"When do you propose to avow your own children?" I asked.
He shook his head without answering. I suppose it is what I ought to
have expected, but in the swaggering, self-advertising twentieth
century it seemed incredible that I had found a man content for all
time to bind his laurels round the brow of a lay figure.
"In time...." I began, but he shook his head again.
"You can stop me with a single sentence. I'm in your hands. 'Gordon
Tremayne' dies as soon as his identity's discovered."
Years ago I remember William Sharp using the same threat with "'Fiona
Macleod.'"
"You think it's just self-consciousness," he went on in self-defence.
"You think after what's passed...."
"It's getting farther away each day, Seraph," I suggested gently as he
hesitated.
"I know. 'Tisn't that--altogether. It's the future."
"What's going to happen?"
"If 'Gordon Tremayne' knew that," he answered, "you wouldn't find him
writing plays."
Arm-in-arm we walked the length of the Embankment. As I grew to know
the Seraph better, I learnt not to interrupt his long silences. It was
trying for the patience, I admit, but his natural shyness even with
friends was so great that you could see him balancing an idea for
minutes at a time before he found courage to put it into words. I was
always reminded of the way a tortoise projects its head cautiously
from the shell, looks all round, starts, stops, starts again, before
mustering resolution to take a step forward....
"D'you believe in premonitions, Toby?" he asked as we passed
Cleopatra's Needle on our second journey eastward.
"Yes," I answered. I should have said it in any case, to draw him out;
as a matter of fact, I have the greatest difficulty in knowing what I
do or do not believe. On the rare occasions when I do make up my mind
on any point I generally have to reconsider my decision.
"I had a curious premonition lately," he went on. "One of these days
you may see it in the third volume of 'The Child of Misery.'"....
I cannot give the story in his own words, because I was merely a
credulous, polite listener. He believed in his premonition, and the
belief gave a vigour and richness to the recital which I cannot hope
or attempt to reproduce. Here is a prosaic record of the facts. At the
close of the previous winter he had found himself in attendance at a
costume ball, muffled to the eyes in the cerements of an Egyptian
mummy. The dress was too hot for dancing, and he was wandering through
the ball-room inspecting the costumes, when an unreasoning impulse
drove him out into the entrance hall. Even as he went, the impulse
seemed more than a caprice; in his own words, had his feet been
manacled, he would have gone there crawling on his knees.
The hall was almost deserted when he arrived. A tall Crusader in coat
armour stood smoking a cigarette and talking to a Savoyard
peasant-girl. Their conversation was desultory, but the words spoken
by the girl fixed a careless, frank, self-confident voice in his
memory. Then the Crusader was despatched on an errand, and the
peasant-girl strolled up and down the hall.
In a mirror over the fireplace the Seraph watched her movements. She
was slight and of medium height, with small features and fine black
hair falling to the waist in two long plaits. The brown eyes, set far
apart and deep in their sockets, were never still, and the face wore
an expression of restless, rebellious energy.... Once their eyes met,
but the mummy wrappings were discouraging. The girl continued her
walk, and the Seraph returned to his mirror. Whatever his mission, the
Crusader was unduly long away; his partner grew visibly impatient, and
once, for no ostensible reason, the expression reflected in the mirror
changed from impatience to disquiet; the brown eyes lost their fire
and self-confidence, the mouth grew wistful, the whole face lonely and
frightened.
It was this expression that came to haunt the Seraph's dreams. In a
fantastic succession of visions he found himself talking frankly and
intimately with the Savoyard peasant; their conversation was always
interrupted, suddenly and brutally, as though she had been snatched
away. Gradually--like sunlight breaking waterily through a mist--the
outline of her features become visible again, then the eyes wide open
with fear, then the mouth with lips imploringly parted.
The Seraph had quickened his pace till we were striding along at
almost five miles an hour. Opposite the south end of Middle Temple
Lane he dragged his arm abruptly out of mine, planted his elbows on
the parapet of the Embankment, and stared out over the muddy waters,
with knuckles pressed crushingly to either side of his forehead.
"I don't know what to make of it!" he exclaimed. "What does it mean?
Who is she? Why does she keep coming to me like this? I don't know
her, I've caught that one glimpse of her. Yet night after night. And
it's so real, I often don't know whether I'm awake or asleep. I've
never felt so ... so _conscious_ of anybody in my life. I saw her for
those few minutes, but I'm as sure as I'm sure of death that I shall
meet her again----"
"Don't you want to?"
He passed a hand wearily in front of his eyes, and linked an arm once
more in mine.
"I don't know," he answered as we turned slowly back and walked up
Norfolk Street into the Strand. "Yes, if it's just to satisfy
curiosity and find out who she is. But there's something more, there's
some big catastrophe brewing. I'd sooner be out of it. At least ...
she may want help. I don't know. I honestly don't know."
When we got back to the Savoy I invited him up to my room for a drink.
He refused on the score of lateness, though I could see he was
reluctant to be left to his own company.
"Don't think me sceptical," I said, "because I can't interpret your
dreams. And don't think I imagine it's all fancy if I tell you to
change your ideas, change your work, change your surroundings. The
Rodens have invited you down to their place, why don't you come?"
He shivered at the abrupt contact with reality.
"I do hate meeting people," he protested.
"Seraph," I said, "I'm an unworthy vessel, but on your own showing I
shall be submerged in politics if there isn't some one to create a
diversion. Come to oblige me."
He hesitated for several moments, alternately crushing his opera hat
and jerking it out straight.
"All right," he said at last.
"You will be my salvation."
"You deserve it, for what it's worth."
"God forbid!" I cried in modest disclaimer.
"You're the only one that isn't quite sure I'm mad," he answered,
turning away in the direction of Adelphi Terrace.
For the next two days I had little time to spare for the Seraph's
premonitions or Joyce Davenant's conspiracies. My brother sailed from
Tilbury on the Friday, I was due the following day at the Rodens, and
in the interval there were incredibly numerous formalities to be
concluded before Gladys was finally entrusted to my care. The scene of
reconciliation between her father and myself was most affecting. In
the old days when Brian toiled at his briefs and I sauntered away the
careless happy years of my youth, there is little doubt that I was
held out as an example not to be followed. We need not go into the
question which of us made the better bargain with life, but I know my
brother largely supported himself in the early days of struggle by
reflecting that a more than ordinarily hideous retribution was in
store for me. Do I wrong him in fancying he must have suffered
occasional pangs of disappointment?
Perhaps I do; there was really no time for him to be disappointed.
Almost before retribution could be expected to have her slings and
arrows in readiness, my ramblings in the diamond fields of South
Africa had made me richer than he could ever hope to become by playing
the Industrious Apprentice at the English Common Law Bar. More
charitable than the Psalmist--from whom indeed he differs in all
material respects--Brian could not bring himself to believe that any
one who flourished like the green bay tree was fundamentally wicked.
At our meeting he was almost cordial. Any slight reserve may be
attributed to reasonable vexation that he had grown old and scarred in
the battle of life while time with me had apparently stood still.
For all our cordiality, Gladys was not given away without substantial
good advice. He was glad to see me settling down, home again from my
curious ... well, home again from my wanderings; steadying with age. I
was face to face with a great responsibility.... I suppose it was
inevitable, and I did my best to appear patient, but in common
fairness a judge has no more right than a shopwalker to import a trade
manner into private life. The homily to which I was subjected should
have been reserved for the Bench; there it is expected of a judge;
indeed he is paid five thousand a year to live up to the expectation.
When Brian had ended I was turned over to the attention of my
sister-in-law. Like a wise woman she did not attempt competition with
her husband, and I was dismissed with the statement that Gladys would
cause me no trouble, and an inconsistent exhortation that I was not
to let her get into mischief. Finally, in case of illness or other
mishap, I was to telegraph immediately by means of a code contrived
for the occasion. I remember a great many birds figured among the
code-words: "Penguin" meant "She has taken a slight chill, but I have
had the doctor in, and she is in bed with a hot water-bottle";
"Linnet" meant "Scarlatina"; "Bustard" "Appendicitis, operation
successfully performed, going on well." Being neither ornithologist
nor physician, I had no idea there were so many possible diseases, or
even so that there were enough birds to go round. It is perhaps
needless to add that I lost my copy of the code the day after they
sailed, and only discovered it by chance a fortnight ago when Brian
and his wife had been many months restored to their only child, and I
had passed out of the life of all three--presumably for ever.
In case no better opportunity offer, I hasten to put it on record that
my sister-in-law spoke no more than the truth in saying her daughter
would cause me no trouble. I do not wish for a better ward. During the
weeks that I was her foster father, circumstances brought me in
contact with some two or three hundred girls of similar age and
position. They were all a little more emancipated, rational, and
independent than the girls of my boyhood, but of all that I came to
know intimately, Gladys was the least abnormal and most tractable.
I grew to be very fond of her before we parted, and my chief present
regret is that I see so little likelihood of meeting her again. She
was affectionate, obedient, high-spirited--tasting life for the first
time, finding the savour wonderfully sweet on her lips, knowing it
could not last, determined to drain the last drop of enjoyment before
wedlock called her to the responsibilities of the drab, workaday
world. She had none of Joyce Davenant's personality, her reckless
courage and obstinate, fearless devilry; none of Sylvia Roden's
passionate fire, her icy reserve and imperious temper. Side by side
with either, Gladys would seem indeterminate, characterless; but she
was the only one of the three I would have welcomed as a ward in those
thunderous summer days before the storm burst in its fury and scorched
Joyce and Sylvia alike. There were giants in those days, but England
has only limited accommodation for supermen. Had I my time and choice
over again, my handkerchief would still fall on the shoulder of my
happy, careless, laughing, slangy, disrespectful niece.
I accompanied Gladys to Tilbury and saw her parents safely on board
the _Bessarabia_. On our return to Pont Street I found a letter of
instructions to guide us in our forthcoming visit to Hampshire. My
niece had half opened it before she noticed the address.
"It was Phil's writing, so I thought it must be for me," was her
ingenious explanation.
As I completed the opening and began to read the letter, my mind went
abruptly back to some enigmatic words of Seraph's: "Is Phil going to
be there?". I remembered him asking. "Oh then it certainly won't be a
bachelor party."
CHAPTER III
BRANDON COURT
"I remember waiting for you when the steamer came in. Do
you?"
"At the Lily Lock, beyond Hong Kong and Java?"
"Do _you_ call it that too?" ...
... "You're the Boy, my Brushwood Boy, and I've known you
all my life!"--RUDYARD KIPLING, "The Brushwood Boy."
The following morning I took up my new duties in earnest, and conveyed
myself and my luggage from the Savoy to Pont Street.
"I'm allowing plenty of time for the train," I told Gladys when she
had finished keeping me waiting. "Apparently we've got to meet the
rest of the party at Waterloo, and Phil isn't certain if he'll be
there."
As we drove down to the station I refreshed my memory with a second
reading of his admirably lucid instructions.
"Eleven fifteen is the train," he wrote. "If I'm not there, make the
Seraph introduce you: he knows everybody. If he cries off at the last
minute (it's just like him), you'll have to manage on your own
account, with occasional help from Gladys. She doesn't know Rawnsley
or Culling, but she'll point out Gartside if you don't recognize
him...."
"Do you _know_ him?" Gladys asked me in surprise.
"I used to, many years ago. In fact I did him a small service when he
had for the moment forgotten that he was in the East and that the
Orient does not always see eye to eye with the West."
Gladys' feminine curiosity was instantly aroused, but I refused to
gratify it. After all it was ancient history now, Gartside was several
years younger at the time, and in the parlance of the day, "it was the
sort of thing that might have happened to any one." He is now a highly
respected member of the House of Lords, occupying an important public
position. I should long ago have forgotten the whole episode but for
his promise that if ever he had a chance of repaying me he would do
so. I have every reason now to remember that the bread I cast on the
waters returned to me after not many days.
"What's he like now?" I asked Gladys.
"Oh, a topper!"
I find the rising generation defines with a minimum of words.
"I mean he's a real white man," she proceeded, _per obscurans ad
obscurantius_; I was left to find out for myself how much remained of
the old Gartside. I found him little changed, and still a magnificent
specimen of humanity, six feet four in height, fifteen stone in
weight, as strong as a giant, and as gentle as a woman. He was the
kindest, most courteous, largest-hearted man I have ever met: slow of
speech, slow of thought, slow of perception. I am afraid you might
starve at his side without his noticing it; when once he had seen your
plight he would give you his last crust and go hungry himself. He was
brave and just as few men have the courage to be; you trusted and
followed him implicitly; with greater quickness and more imagination
he would have been a great man, but with his weak initiative and
unready sympathy he might lead you to irreparable disaster. I suppose
he was five and thirty at this time, balder than when I last met him,
and stouter than in the days when he backed himself to stroke a
Leander four half-way over the Putney course against the 'Varsity
Eight.
I went on with Philip's letter of explanation.
"Nigel Rawnsley you will find majestic, Olympian, and omniscient. He
is tall, sandy-haired, and lantern-jawed like his father; do not
comment on the likeness, as he cherishes the belief that the Prime
Minister's son is of somewhat greater importance than the Prime
Minister. If you hear him speak before you see him, you will recognise
him by his exquisite taste in recondite epithets. He will hail you
with a Greek quotation, convict you of inaccuracy and ignorance on
five different matters of common knowledge in as many minutes, and
finally give you up as hopeless. This is just his manner. It is also
his manner to wear a conspicuous gold cross to mark his religious
enthusiasms, and to travel third as an earnest of democratic
instincts. He is not a bad fellow if you don't take him too seriously;
he is making a mark in the House."
"Prig," murmured Gladys with conviction, as I came to the end of the
Rawnsley dossier. She did not know him, but was giving expression to a
very general feeling.
I crossed swords more than once with Nigel Rawnsley in the course of
the following few months, and in our duelling caught sight of more
than one unamiable side to his character. While my mood is charitable,
I may perhaps say a word in his favour. It is just possible that I
have met more types of men than Philip Roden; it takes me longer to
size them up; perhaps also I see a little deeper than he did. Nigel
went through life handicapped by an insatiable ambition and an
abnormal self-consciousness. Without charm of manner or strength of
personality, he must have been from earliest schooldays one of those
who--like the Jews--trample that they be not trampled on. He became
overbearing for fear of being insignificant, corrected your facts for
fear of being squeezed out of the conversation, and sharpened his
tongue to secure your respect if not your love. Some one in the House
christened him "Whitaker's Almanack," but in fact his knowledge was
not exceptionally wide. He was always right because he had the wisdom
to keep silent when out of his depth, and intervene effectively when
he was sure of his ground.
I never heard him in Court, but his defect as a statesman must have
been apparent as a barrister; he would take no risks, try no bluff,
make no attack till horse, foot, and gun were marshalled in readiness.
Given time he would win by dogged perseverance, but, as in my own
case, he must know to his cost that a slippery opponent will give him
no time for his ponderous grappling. Nigel's great natural gifts will
carry him to the front when he has learnt a little more humanity; and
humanity will come as he loses his dread of ridicule. At present the
youngest parliamentary hand can brush aside his weighty facts and
figures by a simple ill-natured witticism; and the fact that I am not
now languishing in one of His Majesty's gaols is due to my discovery
of the weak spot in his armour. Though my heart beat fast, I was still
able to laugh at him in my moment of crisis; and so long as I
laughed--though he had all the trumps in his hand--he must needs think
I had reason for my laughter.
"The last of the party," Philip's letter concluded, "will be Pat
Culling. He is an irrepressible Irishman of some thirty summers, with
a brogue that becomes unintelligible whenever he remembers to employ
it. You will find him thin and short, with a lean, expressionless
face, grey eyes, and black hair. He can play any musical instrument
from a sackbut to a Jew's harp, and speak any language from Czech to
Choctaw. Incidentally he is the idlest and most sociable man in
Europe, and gets (and gives) more amusement out of life than any one I
know.
"You should look for him first at the front of the train, where he
will be bribing the driver to let him travel on the engine; failing
that, try the station-master's office, where he will be ordering a
special in broken Polish; or the collector's gate, where he will be
losing his ticket and discovering it in the inspector's back hair. He
is a skilled conjuror, and may produce a bowl of gold fish from your
hat at any moment. On second thoughts, you will more probably find him
gently baiting the incorruptible Rawnsley, who makes an admirable
foil. Don't be lured into playing poker on the way down; Paddy will
deal himself five aces with the utmost _sang froid_."
"Now we know exactly where we are," I remarked replacing the letter in
my pocket, as our taxi mounted the sloping approach to Waterloo.
"And it's all wasted labour," said Gladys as I began to assemble her
belongings from different corners of the cab. "Phil's here the whole
time."
I reminded myself that I stood _in loco parentis_, shook hands with
Philip and plunged incontinently into a sea of introductions.
The journey down was unexpectedly tranquil. Gladys and Philip
conversed in a discreet undertone, paying no more attention to my
presence than if I had been the other side of the world. Gartside told
me how life had treated him since our parting in Asia Minor; while
Culling produced a drawing block and embarked on an illustrated
history of Rawnsley's early years. It was entitled "L'Avénement de
Nigel," and the series began with the first cabinet council hastily
summoned to be informed of the birth--I noticed that the ministers
were arrayed in the conventional robes of the Magi--it concluded with
the first meeting of electors addressed by the budding statesman. For
reasons best known to the artist, his victim was throughout deprived
of the consolation of clothing, though he seldom appeared without the
badge of the C.E.M.S. Rawnsley grew progressively more uncomfortable
as the series proceeded, and in the interests of peace I was not sorry
when we arrived at Brandon Junction.
We strolled out into the station yard while our luggage was being
collected. A car was awaiting us, with a girl in the driving-seat, and
from the glimpse gained a few days earlier in Pont Street, I
recognized her as Sylvia Roden. I should have liked to enjoy a long
rude stare, but my attention was distracted by the changed demeanour
of my fellow travellers. Gartside advanced with the air Mark Antony
must have assumed in bartering away a world for a smile from
Cleopatra; Rawnsley struggled to produce a Sir Walter Raleigh effect
without the cloak; even Culling was momentarily sobered.
When I turned from her admirers to Sylvia herself, it was to marvel at
the dominion and assurance of an English girl in her beauty and proud
youth. She sat in a long white dust-coat, her fingers toying with the
ends of a long motor veil. The small oval face, surmounted by rippling
black hair, was a singularly perfect setting for two lustrous, soft,
unfathomable brown eyes. As she held her court, a smile of challenge
hovered round her small, straight mouth, as though she were conscious
of the homage paid her, and claimed it as a right; behind the smile
there lurked--or so I fancied--a suggestion of weariness as with one
whom mere adoration leaves disillusioned. Her manner was a baffling
blend of frankness and reserve. The _camaraderie_ of her greeting
reminded me she was one girl brought up in a circle of brothers;
fearless and unaffected, she met us on equal terms and was hailed by
her Christian name. But the frankness was skin deep, and I pitied the
man who should presume on her manner to attempt unwelcome intimacy. It
was a fascinating blend, and she knew its fascination; her friends
were distantly addressed as "Mr. Rawnsley," "Lord Gartside," "Mr.
Culling."
Gladys and I had lingered behind the others, but at our approach
Sylvia jumped down from the car and ran towards us. Her movements were
astonishingly light and quick, and when I amused an idle moment in
trying to fit her with a formula I decided that her veins must be
filled with radium. Possibly the description conveys nothing to other
people; it exactly expresses the feeling that her mobile face, quick
movements of body and passionate nature inspired in me. Later on I
remember the Seraph pointed to the tremendous mental and physical
energy of her father and brothers, asking how a slight girl's frame
could contain such fire without eruption.
Eruptions there certainly were, devastating and cataclysmic....
"How are you, my child?" she exclaimed, catching Gladys by the hands.
"And where's the wicked uncle?"
My niece indicated my presence, and I bowed.
"You?" Sylvia took me in with one rapid glance, and then held out a
hand. "But you look hardly older than Phil."
"I feel even younger," I began.
"Face massage," Culling murmured.
"A good conscience," I protested.
"Why did you have to leave England?" he retorted.
It was the first time I had heard it suggested that my exile was other
than voluntary. I attempted no explanation as I knew Culling would
outbid me. Instead, we gathered silently round the car and watched
Philip attempting with much seriousness to allot seats among an
excessive population that spent its time criticising and rejecting his
arrangements.
"It's the fault of the Roden family!" he exclaimed at last in
desperation. "Why did I come down by this train, and why did you come
to meet us, Sylvia? We're two too many. Look here, climb in,
everybody, and Bob and I'll go in the other car."
"You can't ask a Baron of the United Kingdom to go as luggage,"
objected Culling who had vetoed twice as many suggestions as any one
else.
"Well, you come, Pat," said Phil.
"We Cullings aren't to be put off with something that's not good
enough for Lord Gartside," was the dignified rejoinder.
Philip was seized with inspiration.
"Does any one care to walk?" he asked. "Gladys?"
"You're not going to take this child over wet fields in thin shoes,"
his sister interposed. "She's got a cold as it is."
My eyes strayed casually to the ground and taught me that Sylvia was
shod with neat, serviceable brogues.
"I'll walk," I volunteered in an aside to her, "if you'll show me the
way."
Within two minutes the car had been despatched on its road, and Sylvia
and I set out at an easy, swinging pace through the town and across
the four miles of low meadow land that separated us from Brandon
Court.
"Rather good, that," I remarked as we got clear of the town.
"What was?" she asked.
"Abana, Pharpar and yet a third river of Damascus flowed near at hand,
but it was the sluggish old waters of Jordan that were found worthy."
We were walking single-file along a footpath, and a stile imposed a
temporary check. Sylvia mounted it and sat on the top bar, looking
down on me.
"Are we going to be friends?" she asked abruptly.
"I sincerely hope so."
"It rests with you. And you must decide now, while there's still time
to go back and get a cab at the station."
"We were starting rather well," I pointed out.
"That's just what you weren't doing," she said with a determined shake
of the head. "If we're going to be friends, you must promise never to
make remarks like that. You don't mean them, and I don't like them.
Will you promise?"
"The flesh is weak," I protested.
"Am I worth a little promise like that?"
"Lord! yes," I said. "But I always break my promises."
"You mustn't break this one. It's bad enough with Abana and Pharpar,
as you call them. You know you're really--you won't mind my saying
it?--you're old enough...."
"Age only makes me more susceptible," I lamented. The statement was
perfectly true and I have suffered much mental disquiet on the
subject. So far as I can see, my declining years will be one long
riot of senile infidelity.
"I don't mind that," said Sylvia with a close-lipped smile; "but I
don't want pretty speeches." She jumped down from the stile and stood
facing me, with her clear brown eyes looking straight into mine.
"You're not in love with me, are you?"
I hesitated for a fraction of time, as any man would; but her foot
tapped the ground with impatience.
"Don't be absurd!" she exclaimed, "you know you're not; you've known
me five minutes. Well,"--her voice suddenly lost any asperity it may
have contained, and she laid her hand almost humbly on my arm--"please
don't behave as if you were. I hate it, and hate it, and hate it, till
I can hardly contain myself. But I should like you as a friend. You've
knocked about the world, you're seasoned----"
I held out my hand to seal the bargain.
"I was horribly rude just now!" she exclaimed with sudden penitence.
"I was afraid you were going to be like all the rest."
"Tell me what's expected of me," I begged.
"Nothing. I just want to be friends. You'll find I'm worth it," she
added with a flash of pride.
"I think I saw that the moment we met."
"I wonder."
It was some time before I did full justice to Sylvia, some time before
I appreciated the pathetic loneliness of her existence. For twenty
years she and Philip had been staunch allies. His triumphs and
troubles had been carried home from school to be discussed and shared
with his sister; on the first night of every holiday the pair of them
had religiously taken themselves out to dinner and a theatre, and
Sylvia had been in attendance at every important match in which he
was taking part, and every speech day at which he was presented with a
prize. The tradition was carried on at Oxford, and had only come to an
end when Philip entered public life and won his way into the House of
Commons. Their confidences had then grown gradually less frequent, and
Sylvia, whose one cry--like Kundry's--had ever been, "Let me serve,"
found herself without the opportunity of service. The Roden household,
when I first entered it, was curiously unsympathetic; she was without
an ally; there was much affection and woefully little understanding.
Her father never took counsel with the women of his family, Philip had
slipped away, and neither Robin nor Michael was old enough to take his
place. With her vague, ill-defined craving to be of account in the
world, it was small wonder if she felt herself unfriended and her
devotional overtures rejected. Had her father been any one else, I am
convinced that Sylvia would have joined Joyce Davenant and sought an
outlet for her activities in militancy.
"You're remarkably refreshing, Sylvia," I said. She raised her
eyebrows at the name. "Oh, well," I went on, "if we're going to be
friends.... Besides, it's a very pretty name."
"I hate it!" she exclaimed. "Sylvia Forstead Mornington Roden. I hate
them all!"
"Were you called after Lady Forstead?" I asked.
"Yes. Did you know her?"
I shook my head. Of course I had heard of her and the money left by
her husband, who had chanced to own the land on which Renton came
afterwards to be built. Most of that money, I learned later, was
reposing in trust till Sylvia was twenty-five.
"Your taste in godmothers is commendable," I remarked.
"You think so?" she asked without conviction.
It is not good for a young girl to be burdened with great possessions;
they distort her outlook on life. I wondered to what extent Sylvia was
being troubled in anticipation, but the wonder was idle: nature had
troubled her with sufficient good looks to make mercenary admirers
superfluous.
"Most people...." I began, but stopped as she came to a sudden
standstill.
"I _say_, we forgot all about Mr. Aintree!" she exclaimed.
"He didn't come," I reassured her.
"Oh, Phil said perhaps he mightn't. I gather he usually does accept
invitations and not turn up. I hate people who can't be reasonably
polite."
"He usually refuses the invitation," I said in the Seraph's defence.
"Why?"
I shrugged my shoulders.
"Shyness, I suppose."
"I hate shy people."
"You must ask him."
"I don't know him. What's he like?"
"Oh, I thought you did. He...." I paused and tried to think how the
Seraph should be described; it was not easy. "Medium height," I
ventured at last, "fair hair, rather a white face; curious, rather
haunting dark eyes. Middle twenties, but usually looks younger. Very
nervous and overwrought, frightfully shy...."
"Sounds like a degenerate poet."
"He's had a good deal of trouble," I added. "Be kind to him, Sylvia.
Life's a long agony to him when he's with strangers."
"I hate shy people," she repeated. "It's so silly to be awkward."
"He's not awkward. Incidentally, what a number of things you find time
to hate!"
"I know. I'm composed entirely of hates and bad tempers. And I hate
myself more than anybody else."
"Why?"
"Because I don't understand myself," she answered, "and I can't
control myself."
On arriving at the house I was introduced to my hostess. Lady Roden
was a colourless woman who had sunk to a secondary position in the
household. This was perhaps not surprising in a family that contained
Arthur as the nominal head, and Philip, Sylvia, Robin, and Michael as
Mayors of the Palace. What she lacked in authority was made up in
prestige. On no single day of her life of fifty years did she forget
that she was a Rutlandshire Mornington. I fear I have little respect
for Morningtons--or any other pre-Conquest families--whether they come
from Rutlandshire or any other part of the globe. Such inborn
reverence as I in common with all other Englishmen may ever have
possessed has been starved by many years absence abroad. At Brandon
Court I found the sentiment flourishing hardily: Lady Roden dug for
pedigrees as a dog scratches for a bone. "You are a brother of the
Judge?" she said when we met. "Then--let me see--your sister-in-law
was a Hylton."
I had expected to find the atmosphere oppressive with Front Bench
politics, but the influence of Pat Culling was salutary. Discussion
quailed before his powers of illustration, and the study of "The Rt.
Hon. Sir Arthur Roden Mixing his Metaphors in the Cause of Empire"--it
now hangs in the library of Cadogan Square--rescued the conversation
from controversial destruction. In lieu of politics we had to arrange
for the arrival of our last two guests; Aintree had wired that he was
coming by a later train, and Rawnsley's sister Mavis had to be brought
over some twenty miles from Hanningfold on the Sussex borders. Sylvia
volunteered for the longer journey in her own little runabout, while
the Seraph was to be fetched in the car that went nightly to Brandon
Junction for Arthur's official, cabinet-minister's despatch case.
"What's come over our Seraph the last few years?" Culling asked me,
when the two cars had gone their respective ways and we were smoking a
cheroot in the Dutch Garden. "I've known him from a bit of a boy that
high, and now--God knows--it's in a decline you'd say he was taken.
You can't please him and you can't even anger him. He's like a man has
his heart broken."
I did not know what answer to give.
"Just a passing mood," I suggested.
"It's a mood will have him destroyed," said Culling, gloomily.
He was a kind-hearted, pleasant, superficial fellow, one of those
feckless, humorous Irishmen who laugh at the absurdities of the world
and themselves, and go on laughing till life comes to hold no other
business--a splendid engine for work or fighting, but too idle almost
to make a start, too little concentrated ever to keep the wheel
moving, a man of short cuts and golden roads.... He talked with easy
kindness of the Seraph till a horn sounded far away down the drive and
the Brandon car swept tortuously through the elm avenue to the house.
"A common drunk and disorderly!" Culling shouted as the Seraph came
towards us with his right arm in a sling. He had that morning shut his
thumb in the front door of his flat, and while we dragged the depths
of Waterloo for his body, he had been sitting with his doctor, sick
and faint, having the wound dressed. His face was whiter than usual,
and his manner restless.
"I've kept my promise," he remarked to me.
"I was giving up hope."
"I _had_ to come," he answered in vague perplexity, and relapsed into
one of his longest silences.
We wandered for an hour through the grand old-world gardens,
reverently worshipping their many-coloured spring splendour. Flaming
masses of azaleas blazed forth from a background of white and mauve
rhododendrons; white, grey, and purple lilac squandered their wealth
in riotous display, while the Golden Rain flashed in the evening sun,
and a scented breeze spread the grass walks with a yellow carpet. We
drew a last luxurious deep breath, and turned to watch the nymphæas
closing their eyes for the night.
Beyond the water garden, in an orchard deep with fallen apple-blossom,
Rawnsley and Gartside were stretched in wicker chairs watching an old
spaniel race across the grass in sheer exhilaration of spirit.
"Come and study the Sixth Sense," Gartside called out as we
approached.
"There isn't such a thing, but there's no harm in your studying it,"
said Rawnsley, in a tone that indicated it mattered little what any of
us did to improve or debase our minds.
"Martel!" The dog bounded up at Gartside's call, and he showed us two
glazed, sightless eyes. "Good dog!" He patted the animal's neck, and
Martel raced away to the far end of the orchard. "That dog's as blind
as my boot, but he steers himself as though he'd eyes all over his
head. By Jove! I thought he'd brained himself that time!"
Martel had raced at top speed to the foot of a gnarled apple tree. At
two yards' distance he swerved as though a whip had struck him, and
passed into safety. The same thing happened half a dozen times in as
many minutes.
"He _knows_ it's there," said Gartside. "He's got a sense of distance.
If that isn't a sixth sense, what is it?"
"Intensified smell-sense," Rawnsley pronounced. "If _you_ were blind,
you'd find your smelling and hearing intensified."
"Not enough," said Gartside.
"It's all you'll get. A sense is the perceptiveness of an organ.
You've eyes, ears, a nose, a palate, and a number of sensitive
surfaces. If you want a sixth sense, you must have a sixth perceive
organ. You haven't. Therefore you must be content with seeing,
hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching."
Gartside was not satisfied with the narrow category.
"I know a man who can always tell when there's a cat in the room."
"Before or after seeing it?" Rawnsley inquired politely.
"Oh, before. Genuine case. I tested him by locking a cat in the
sideboard once when he was coming to dine with me. He complained the
moment he got into the room."
"Acute smell-sense," Rawnsley decided.
"You hear of people who can foretell a change in the weather,"
Gartside went on.
"Usually wrong," said Rawnsley. "When they're right, and it isn't
coincidence, you can trace it to the influence of a changed atmosphere
on a sensitive part of their body. An old wound, for instance. Acute
touch sense."
I happened to catch sight of the Seraph lying on his face piling the
fallen apple-blossoms into little heaps.
"What about a sense of futurity?" I asked.
"Did you ever meet the man could spot a Derby winner?" asked Culling,
infected by Rawnsley's scepticism.
"Futurity in respect of yourself," I defined. "What's called
'premonition.'"
Rawnsley demolished me with patient weightiness.
"You come down to breakfast with a headache...."
"Owin' to the unwisdom of mixin' your drinks," Culling interposed.
"...Everything's black. In the course of the day you hear a friend's
dead. 'Ah!' you say, 'I knew something was going to happen.' What
about all those other mornings...."
"Terribly plentiful!" said Culling.
"...When everything's black and nothing happens? It's pure
coincidence."
I defined my meaning yet more narrowly.
"I have in mind the premonition of something quite definite."
"For instance?"
I told him of a phenomenon that has frequently come under my
observation in the East--the power possessed by many natives of
foretelling the exact hour of their death. Quite recently I came
across a case in the Troad where I fell in with a young Greek who had
been wasting for months with some permanent, indefinable fever. One
morning I found him sitting dressed in his library, the temperature
was normal and the pulse regular; he seemed in perfect health. I
congratulated him on his recovery, and was informed that he would die
punctually at eight that evening.
In the course of the day his will was drawn up and signed, the
relatives took their farewells, and a priest administered supreme
unction. I called again at seven o'clock. He seemed still in perfect
health and full possession of his faculties, but repeated his
assertion that he would pass away at eight. I told him not to be
morbid. At ten minutes to eight he warned me that his time was at
hand; after another three minutes he undressed and lay motionless on
his bed. At two minutes past eight the heart had ceased to beat.
"Auto-hypnosis," said Rawnsley when I had done. "A long debilitating
illness in which the mind became more and more abnormal and subject to
fancies. An idea--from a dream, perhaps--that death will take place at
a certain hour. The mind becomes obsessed by that idea until the body
is literally done to death. It's no more premonition than if I say I'm
going to dine to-night between eight and nine. I've an idea I shall, I
shall do my best to make that idea fruitful, and nothing but an
unforeseen eventuality will prevent my premonition coming true. Stick
to the five senses and three dimensions, Merivale. And now come and
dress, or I may not get my dinner after all."
"I think Rawnsley's disposed of premonitions," said the Seraph from
the grass. Possibly I was the only one who detected a note of irony in
his voice.
We had been given adjoining rooms, and in the course of dressing I had
a visit from him with the request that I should tie his tie.
"Choose the other hand next time," I advised him, when I had done my
bad best. "Authors and pianists, you know--it's your livelihood."
"It'll be well enough by the time I've anything to write."
"Is your Miserable Child causing trouble?"
Never at that time having been myself guilty of a line of prose or
verse, I could only judge of composition by the light of pure reason.
To write an entirely imaginative work would be--as the poet said of
love--"the devil." An autobiographical novel, I thought, would be like
keeping a diary and chopping it into chapters of approximately equal
length.
"Have you ever kept a diary a week in advance?" the Seraph asked when
I put this view before him.
"Why not wait a week?" I suggested, again in the light of pure reason.
"You'd lose the psychology of expectation--uncertainty."
"I suppose you would," I assented hazily.
"I want to dispose of my premonition on the Rawnsley lines."
"What form does it take?"
His lips parted, and closed again quickly.
"I'll let you know in a week's time," he answered.
Sylvia had not returned when we assembled in the drawing-room, and
after waiting long enough to chill the soup and burn the _entrée_, it
was decided to start without her. Nothing of that dinner survives in
my memory, from which I infer that cooking and conversation were
unrelievedly mediocre. With the appearance of the cigars I moved away
from Lady Roden's empty chair to the place vacated by Gladys between
Philip and the Seraph.
"Thumb hurting you?" I asked.
He looked so white that I thought he must be in pain.
"I'm all right, thanks," he answered. Immediately to belie his words
the sudden opening of the door made him jump almost out of his chair.
I saw the footman who was handing round the coffee bend down and
whisper something to Arthur.
"Sylvia's turned up at last," we were told.
"Did the car break down?" I asked; but Arthur could only say that she
had returned twenty minutes before and was changing her dress.
"Has she brought Mavis?" asked Rawnsley.
"The man only said...."
Arthur left the sentence unfinished and turned his head to find Sylvia
framed in the open doorway. She had changed into a white silk dress,
and was wearing a string of pearls round her slender throat. Posed
with one hand to the necklace and the other still holding the handle
of the door, she made a picture I shall not easily forget. A study
in black and white it was, with the dark hair and eyes thrown into
relief by her pale face and light dress.... I must have stared
unceremoniously, but my stare was distracted by a numbing grip on my
forearm. I found the Seraph making his fingers almost meet through
bone and muscle; he had half risen and was gazing at her with parted
lips and shining eyes. Then we all rose to our feet as she came into
the room.
"The car went all right," she explained, slipping into an empty chair
by her father's side. "Please sit down, all of you, or I shall be
sorry I came. I'm only here for a minute. Mavis hasn't come, Mr.
Rawnsley. Your mother didn't know why she was staying on in town; she
ought to have been down last night or first thing this morning. She
hadn't wired or anything, so I waited till the six-forty got in, and
as she wasn't on that, I came back alone. No, no dinner, thanks. Mrs.
Rawnsley gave me some sandwiches."
"I hope there's nothing wrong," I said in the tone that tries to be
sympathetic and only succeeds in arousing general misgiving.
Sylvia turned her eyes in my direction, catching sight of the Seraph
as she did so.
"I'm so sorry!" she exclaimed, jumping up and walking round to him
with that wonderful flashing smile that I once in poetical mood
likened to a white rose bursting into flower. "I didn't see you when I
came in. Oh, poor child, what have you done to your hand?"
I watched their faces as the Seraph explained; strong emotion on the
one, polite conventional sympathy on the other.
"Move up one place, Phil," she commanded when the explanation was
ended. "I want to talk to our invalid."
Sylvia's presence kept us lingering long over our cigars, and when at
last we reached the drawing-room, it was to find that Gladys had
already been packed off to bed with mustard plasters and black currant
tea. Life abruptly ceased to have any interest for Philip. I stood
about till my host and hostess were established at the bridge table
with Culling and Gartside, and then accepted the Seraph's invitation
for a stroll on the terrace.
He executed one of the most masterly silences of my experience. Time
and again we paced that terrace till the others had retired to bed and
a single light in the library shone like a Polyphemus eye out of the
face of the darkened house. I pressed for no confidences, knowing that
at the fitting season he would feel the need of a confidant and
unburden himself to me. That was the most feminine of the Seraph's
many feminine characteristics.
It was a wonderfully still, moonlight evening. You would have said he
and I were the two last men in the world, and Brandon Court the only
house in England--till you rounded the corner of the terrace and found
two detectives from Scotland Yard screened by the angle of the house.
Since the beginning of the militant outrages, no cabinet minister had
been allowed to stir without a bodyguard; through the mists of thirty
years I recalled the dynamiter days of my boyhood. In one form or
other the militants, like the poor, were always with us.
It was after one when the Seraph stalked moodily through the open
library window on his way to bed. Had he been less pre-occupied, he
would have seen something that interested me, though I suppose it
would have enlightened neither of us.
On a table by the door stood a photograph of Sylvia. I noticed the
frame first, then the face, and finally the dress. She had arrayed
herself as a Savoyard peasant with short skirt, bare arms and hair
braided in two long plaits. It was not a good likeness, because no
portrait could do justice to a face that owed its fascination to the
fact of never being seen in repose; but it was good enough for me to
judge the effect of such a face on a man of impressionable
temperament....
I had an admirable night's rest, as I always do. I awoke once or
twice, it is true, but dropped off again immediately--almost before I
had time to appreciate that the Seraph was pacing to and fro in the
adjoining room.
CHAPTER IV
THE FIRST ROUND
"BRASSBOUND: You are not my guest: you are my prisoner.
SIR HOWARD: Prisoner?
BRASSBOUND: I warned you. You should have taken my
warning.
SIR HOWARD: ... Am I to understand, then, that you are a
brigand? Is this a matter of ransom?
BRASSBOUND: ... All the wealth of England shall not ransom
you.
SIR HOWARD: Then what do you expect to gain by this?
BRASSBOUND: Justice...."
BERNARD SHAW: "Captain Brassbound's Conversion."
But for Pat Culling the library was deserted when I entered it the
following morning. I found him with a lighted cigarette jauntily
placed behind one ear, at work on an illustrated biography of the
Seraph. Loose sheets still wet from his quick, prolific pen lay
scattered over chairs, tables and floor, and ranged from "The Budding
of the Wing" to "The Chariot of Fire." Fra Angelico, as an irreverent
pavement artist, was Culling's artistic parent for the time being.
"Merivale! on my soul!" he exclaimed as he caught sight of me.
"Returning from church, washed of all his sins and thinkin' what fun
it'll be to start again. We want more paper for this."
As a matter of fact I had not been to church, but Philip had kindly
arranged for my coffee to be brought me in bed, and I saw no reason
for refusing the offer. It was not as if I had work to neglect, and
for some years I have found that other people tend to be somewhat
irritating in the early morning. When I breakfast alone, I am not in
the least fretful, but I believe it to be physiologically true that
the facial muscles grow stiff during sleep, and this makes it
difficult for many people to be smiling and conversational for the
first few hours after waking. So at least I was informed by a medical
student who had spent much time studying the subject in his own
person.
"Seraph up yet?" I asked.
"Is ut up?" Culling exclaimed in scorn, and I learnt for the first
time that the Seraph habitually lived on berries and cold water, slept
in a draught, and mortified his flesh with a hair shirt. He had,
further, seen the sun rise, wetted his wings in an icy river and
escorted Sylvia to the early service.
"I'm glad one of us was there," I said.
"Be glad it wasn't you," answered Culling darkly. "Seraph's in
disgrace over something."
The reason, as I heard some time later, was his unwillingness to enter
Sylvia's place of worship. The Seraph has devoted considerable time
and money to the study of comparative religion, he will analyse any
known faith, and when he has traced its constituent parts back to
their magical origin, he feels he has done something really worth
doing. Sylvia--like most _dévôtes_--could not believe in the existence
of a conscientious free-thinker. Why two attractive young people
should have bothered their heads over such matters, passes my
comprehension. I have always found the man who demolishes a religion
only one degree less tiresome than the man who discovers religion for
the first time. Most men seem fated to do one or the other--and to
tell me all about it.
"Where's she hiding herself now?" I asked.
"Only gone to bring the rest of the family home."
Almost before the words were out of his mouth, the door burst open and
admitted Robin and Michael. The Roden boys were all marked with a
strong family likeness, thin, lithe, and active, with black hair and
brown eyes. Robin had outgrown the age of eccentricity in dress, but
Michael persevered with a succession of elaborate colour-schemes. He
was dressed that morning in brown shoes, brown socks, a brown suit and
brown Homburg hat; even his shirt had a faint brown line, and his
handkerchief a brown border. Of a Sphinx-like family, he was the most
enigmatic; his leading characteristics were a surprisingly fluent use
of the epithet "bloody," and a condition of permanent insolvency. The
first reminded me of the great far-off day when I tested the efficacy
of that word in presence of my parents; the second was the basis of
our too short friendship. Finding a ten-pound note in my pocket, I
tossed Michael whether I should give it to him or keep it myself. I
forget who won; he certainly had the note.
A leave-out day from Winchester accounted for Michael's presence.
Robin had slipped away from Oxford for the nominal purpose of a few
days' rest before his Schools, and with the underlying intention of
perfecting certain intricate arrangements for celebrating his last
Commemoration.
"You'll come, won't you?" he asked as soon as we had been introduced.
"House, Bullingdon and Masonic...."
"Who's paying?" asked Michael.
"Guv'nor, I hope."
"_Je_ ne _pense pas_," murmured Michael, as he wandered round the
library in search of a chair that would fit in with his colour-scheme.
"You come," Robin went on regardless of the interruption. "I've got
six tickets for each. You, and Gladys. Two. Phil, three. Me, four...."
"Only one girl so far," Culling interposed. "D'you and Phil dance
together? And who has the beads? Some one's got to wear a bead
necklace, you aren't admitted without it even in Russia. University
dancing costume, I believe it's called."
"Silly ass!" Robin murmured without heat, but Culling was already
depicting two nude gladiators struggling in front of the Town Hall for
the possession of an exiguous necklace. The Vice-Chancellor and
Hebdomadal Council hurried in horror-stricken file down St. Aldates
from Carfax.
"You, Gladys, and Phil," continued Robin dispassionately. "Sylvia...."
"Oh, am I coming?" asked Sylvia who had just entered the room, and was
unpinning a motor-veil.
"Oh, _yes_, darling Sylvia!" Robin--I know--was both fond and proud of
his sister, but the tone of _ad hoc_ blandishment suggested that
experience had taught him to persuade rather than coerce. "You'll
come, if you love me, and bring Mavis," he added with eyes bashfully
averted. "Now another man, and a girl for Mr. Merivale."
"Is mother included?" asked Sylvia.
"Not if Mr. Merivale comes," Robin answered in modest triumph. "Who'd
you like?" he asked me.
"Keep a spare ticket up your sleeve," I counselled. "Don't lay on any
one specially for me, I've seen my best dancing days. In any case I
shouldn't last the course three nights running. You'll find me
drifting away for a little bridge if I see you're not getting up to
mischief."
Robin sucked his pencil meditatively, waved to the Seraph who had just
entered the room, and turned to his sister.
"Well, who's it to be?" he asked.
"I don't yet know if I'm coming," Sylvia answered.
"Rot! You must!" said Robin in a tone of mingled firmness and
misgiving that suggested memories of previous unsuccessful efforts to
hustle his sister. "Think it over," he added more mildly, "but let me
know soon, I want the thing fixed up. Whose car, Phil? It's the
driving of Jehu, for he driveth furiously."
Philip closed a Blue Book, removed his feet from the back of Culling's
chair and strolled to the window. A long green touring car was racing
up the drive, cutting all corners.
"The Old Man, by Jove!" he exclaimed.
"Who?"
"Rawnsley. I wonder what he wants."
Michael, who had at last found a brown leather armchair to accord with
the day's colour scheme, took on himself to explain the Prime
Minister's sudden appearance.
"He's come to fetch that bloody Nigel away," he volunteered. "Praise
God with a loud voice. Or else it's a war with Germany."
"Or the offer of a peerage," I suggested pessimistically.
"I much prefer the war with Germany," answered Michael, with the
selfishness of youth. "I've no use for honourables, and he'd only be a
viscount. 'Gad, I wonder if old Gillingham's handed in his knife and
fork! That means the Chancellorship for the guv'nor, and they'll make
him an earl, and you'll be Lady Sylvia, my adored sister. How
perfectly bloody! I shall emigrate."
We were soon put out of our suspense. The library was in theory the
inviolable sanctuary of the Attorney General, and at Philip's
suggestion we began to retreat through the open French windows into
the garden. The Seraph and I, however, stood at the end of the file
and were caught by Arthur and the Prime Minister before we could
escape. Rawnsley had forgotten me during my absence abroad, and we had
to be introduced afresh.
"Don't go for a moment," said Arthur, as we made another movement
towards the window. "You may be able to help us."
I pulled up a chair and watched Rawnsley fumbling for a
spectacle-case. He had aged rather painfully since the day I first met
him five-and-twenty years before, as President of the Board of Trade,
coming to Oxford to address some political club.
"Sheet of paper? A.B.C., Roden?" he demanded in the quick, staccato
voice of a man who is always trying to compress three weeks' work into
three days. He had his son's ruthless vigour and wilful assurance
without any of Nigel's thin-skinned self-consciousness. "Thanks. Now.
My daughter's missing, Mr. Merivale. You may be able to help. Do you
know her by sight?"
I mentioned the glimpse I had caught of her at the theatre.
"Quite enough. She left Downing Street yesterday morning at a quarter
to ten and was to call at her dressmaker's and come down to
Hanningford by the eleven-twenty. We've only two decent trains in the
day, and if she missed that she was to lunch in town and come by the
four-ten. You left at eleven-fifteen, from platform five. The
eleven-twenty goes from platform four. May I ask if you saw anything
of her before you left?"
I said I had not, and added that I was so busily engaged in meeting
old friends and being introduced to new ones that I had had neither
time nor eyes....
"Thank you!" he interrupted, turning to the Seraph. "Mr. Aintree, you
know my daughter, and Roden tells me you came down by the four-ten
yesterday afternoon. The train slips a coach at Longfield, a few miles
beyond Hanningford. Did you by any chance see who was travelling by
the slip?"
The Seraph was no more helpful than I had been, and Rawnsley shut the
A.B.C. with an impatient slap.
"We must try in other directions, then," he said. "She never left
London."
"Have you tried the dressmaker's?" I asked.
"Arrived ten, left ten-forty," said Rawnsley.
"Are any of her friends ill?" I asked. "Is she likely to have been
called away suddenly?"
"Oh, I know why she's disappeared," Rawnsley answered. "This letter
makes that quite plain. I want to find where it took place--with a
view to tracing her."
He threw me over a typewritten letter, with the words, "Received by
first delivery to-day, posted in the late fee box of the South-Western
District Office at Victoria."
The letter, so far as I remember it, ran as follows:
"DEAR SIR,
"This is to inform you that your daughter is well and in safe
keeping, but that she is being held as a hostage pending the
satisfactory settlement of the Suffrage Question. As you are
aware, Sir George Marklake has secured second place in the
ballot for Private Member's Bills. Your daughter will be
permitted to communicate with you by post, subject to
reasonable censorship; on the day when you promise special
facilities and Government support for the Marklake Bill, and
again at the end of the Report Stage and Third Reading. The same
privilege will be accorded at the end of each stage in the House
of Lords, and she will be restored to you on the day following
that on which the Bill receives the Royal Assent.
"You will hardly need to be reminded that the Marklake Bill is
to be taken on the first Private Member's night after the
Recess. Should you fail to give the assurances we require, it
will be necessary for us to take such further steps as may seem
best calculated to secure the settlement we desire."
It took me some minutes to digest the letter before I was in a
condition to offer even the most perfunctory condolence. Now that the
blow had been struck, I found myself wondering why it had never been
attempted before.
"You've no clue?" I asked.
Rawnsley inspected the letter carefully and held it up to the light.
"Written with a Remington, I should say. And a new one, without a
single defect in type or alignment. And the paper is made by
Hitchcock. That's all I have to go on."
"What are you going to do?"
"Advise Scotland Yard, I suppose. Then await developments. I don't
wish what I've told you this morning to go any further; no good
purpose will be served by giving the militants a free advertisement.
When I am in town, it is to be understood that Mavis is with her
mother at Hanningford; and when I am at Hanningford, Mavis must be at
Downing Street."
One has no business in private life to badger ministers with political
questions, but I could not help asking what line Rawnsley proposed to
take with the Marklake Bill. His grey eyes flashed with momentary
fire.
"It won't be taken this session," he declared. "I'm moving to
appropriate all Private Members' time for the Poor Law Bill. And
that's all, I think; I must be getting back to my wife, she's--a good
deal upset. Can you spare Nigel, Roden? I should like to take him if I
may. Good-bye, Mr. Merivale. Good-bye, Mr. ---- Oh, by the way, Roden,
remember you're tarred with the same brush. As soon as the Recess is
over, you'll have to keep a close watch on your family. Harding's
another; I shall have to warn him."
Rawnsley's departure left me with a feeling of anti-climax and vague
discomfort. Short of assassination, which would have defeated its own
object, a policy of abduction was the boldest and most effective that
the militants could devise at a time when--in Joyce's words--all
arguments had been exhausted on both sides and war _à outrance_ was
declared by women who insisted on a vote against men who refused to
concede it. I had every reason to think I knew whose brain had evolved
that abduction policy; its reckless simplicity and directness were
characteristic. Then and now I wondered, and still wonder, whether the
author of that policy had sufficient imagination and perspective to
appreciate the enormity of her offence, or the seriousness of the
penalty attendant on non-success.
"Ber-luddy day!" exclaimed Michael, rejoining us in the library and
delicately brushing occasional drops of moisture from his immaculate
person. A heavy downpour of rain was starting, and though I looked
like being spared initiation into the mysteries of golf--which I am
not yet infirm enough to learn--it was not very clear how we were to
kill time between meal and meal. Gladys was spending the morning
quietly in her room, Philip wandered to and fro like a troubled
spirit, and Sylvia had mysteriously departed.
In time Michael condescended to give us the reason. It appeared that
while we were closeted with Rawnsley in the library, Robin had decided
that rest and relaxation before his Schools could best be secured by
the organisation of an impromptu Calico Ball, to be given that night
to all who would come. While he sat at the telephone summoning the
County of Hampshire to do his bidding, Sylvia had departed in her
little white runabout to purchase masks and a bale of calico from
Brandon Junction, and scour the neighbourhood in search of piano,
violin, and 'cello. The wet afternoon was to be spent by the women of
the party in improvising costumes, by the men in French-chalking the
floor of the ball-room.
I took the precaution of calling on Gladys to acquaint her with the
day's arrangements, and beg her to see that I was not compelled to
wear any costume belittling to the dignity of a middle-aged uncle.
Then after writing a bulletin to catch my brother at Gibraltar, I felt
I had earned rest and a cheroot before luncheon. Brandon Court was one
of those admirably appointed houses where you could be certain of
finding wooden matches in every room; it was not, however, till I got
back to the library that I found companionship and the Seraph. He was
lying on a sofa writing slowly and painfully with his left hand.
"If that's volume three," I said, "I won't interrupt. If it's
anything else, we'd better smoke and talk. I will do the smoking."
"I'm only scribbling," he answered. "There's no hurry about volume
three."
"Your public--_quorum pars non magna sum_--is growing impatient."
"There won't be any volume three," he said quietly.
"But why not? I mean, a mere temporary hitch...."
"It's not that. If it wasn't for this hand I could write like, well,
like you _do_ write once in a lifetime."
"What's to stop you?"
"Nothing. I only said there wouldn't be a volume three. I shan't
publish it."
"Why not?"
His big blue eyes looked up at me thoughtfully for a moment from under
their long lashes. Then he crumpled up the half-covered sheet of
paper, remarking--
"There are some things you can't make public."
"But with a _nom de plume_...."
"I might let _you_ see it," he conceded.
There we had to leave the subject, as the library was soon afterwards
invaded by zealous seekers after luncheon, first Lady Roden and
Gartside, then the rest of the party with the single exception of
Sylvia. Lady Roden walked over to the window and gazed in dismay at
the unceasing downpour.
"Is Sylvia back yet, does anybody know?" she asked.
"She came in about a quarter of an hour ago," volunteered the Seraph.
"Was she very wet?"
"I didn't see her."
Lady Roden bustled out of the room to make first-hand investigation.
"She took a Burberry with her," Robin called out; then springing up he
seized an ebony paper knife and advanced on Michael who was reclining
decoratively on a Chesterfield sofa. "Talking of Burberries," he went
on, with menace in his tone, "what the deuce d'you mean by stealing
mine, Michael?"
"Wouldn't be seen dead in your bloody Burberry," Michael responded
with delicate languor.
The Roden boys were all much of a size, and on the subject of raided
and disputed garments a fierce border warfare raged unintermittently
round their bedroom doors. It was so invariable a rule with Michael to
meet all direct charges with an equally direct denial that his
brothers placed but slight reliance on his word.
"What was it doing in your room, then?" persisted Robin, as he applied
the paper-knife to the soles of Michael's feet.
"That was Phil's," said Michael ingenuously.
Robin turned to his elder brother with the suggestion of a little
disciplinary boiling-oil.
"It'll be enough if we just ruffle him," answered the humane Philip.
"Keep the door, Pat. Now, Robin!"
The perfect harmony of their attack argued long practice. Almost
before I had time to move out of the way, Culling was standing with
his back to the door while a scuffling trio on the hearthrug indicated
that castigation was already being meted out. Within two minutes the
immaculate Michael had been reduced to slim, white nudity, and even as
the decorous Gartside proffered a consolatory "_Times'_ Educational
Supplement," the two brothers and Culling had divided the raiment and
taken their centrifugal course through the house, secreting boots,
socks, tie and collar in a succession of ingeniously inaccessible
places as they went. Then the gong sounded, and Gartside took me in to
luncheon.
Such little breezes, as I afterwards discovered, were characteristic
of Brandon Court when the three brothers were at home and Philip had
forgotten his public dignity. I could have spared the present
outbreak, as the inflammatory word "Burberry" had kept me from putting
a certain question to the Seraph. At one-thirty he had told Lady Roden
that Sylvia had come in about a quarter of an hour before: to be
strictly accurate, she had entered the yard as the stable clock struck
one-fifteen, and had come into the house three minutes later by a side
door and gone straight to her room by a side staircase. The Seraph and
I had been sitting in the library since twelve-forty-five. The library
looked out over a terrace on to the lawn: stable yard, side door and
side staircase were at the diametrically opposite angle of the house.
It was impossible for any one, even with the Seraph's uncannily acute
senses, to hear a sound from the stable yard; even had it been
possible, he could not have identified it as the sound of Sylvia's
return.
I put my question in the smoking-room after luncheon, but got no
satisfactory answer. Meeting Sylvia in the hall a few minutes later, I
took my revenge by setting her to find out.
The afternoon was spent in polishing the ball-room floor. Others
worked, I offered advice. At one point, Michael, too, showed a
tendency to offer advice, but the threat that his young body would be
dragged up and down till the bones cut through the skin and scratched
the floor, was effectual in persuading him to swathe his feet in
towels and wade through uncharted seas of French chalk to the infinite
detriment of the blue colour-scheme he had been forced into adopting
for luncheon.
Mrs. Roden, Sylvia and Gladys retired with their three maids and a
bale of calico. From time to time one of us would be summoned to have
our measurements taken, but no indication was manifested of the guise
in which we were to appear. At eight we retired to our rooms with
sinking hearts; at eight-thirty a group of sheepish men loitered at
the stair-head, waiting for one less self-conscious than the rest to
give a lead to the others.
The ball--when it came and found us filled and reckless with
dinner--proved an unqualified success. My indistinct memory of it
recalls a number of pretty girls who danced well, talked very quickly,
and called me--without exception--"my dear." I sat out two with
Sylvia, and was cut three times by Gladys, who disappeared with Philip
at an early stage. Further, I supped twice with two creditably hungry
girls, discussed the lineage of the county with Lady Roden, and smoked
a sympathetic cigarette with a nice-looking shy boy of fifteen, who
was always being cut by Gladys when he was not being cut by some one
else. His name was Willoughby, and I hope some girl has smiled on him
less absent-mindedly than my niece.
In my few spare moments I watched Sylvia dealing with her male guests.
Culling approached and was rewarded with a smile and one dance.
Gartside followed and received an even sweeter, Tristan-und-Isolde
smile, and the same proportion of her programme. The Seraph,
arm-in-sling, hung unostentatiously on the outskirts of the crowd, and
with much hesitation summoned courage to ask if she could spare him
one to sit out. She gave him two, and extended it later to three.
I heard afterwards that at the end of the third he prepared to return
to the ball-room.
"Who are you taking this one with?" she asked him.
"No one," he told her.
"Why not stay here, then?"
"Haven't you promised it to young Willoughby?"
"He'll survive the disappointment," said Sylvia lightly.
The Seraph shook his head. "May I have one later?" he asked. "You
oughtn't to cut Willoughby, he's been looking forward to it."
Sylvia was not accustomed or inclined to dictation from others.
"Have you asked him?" she said, uncertain whether to be amused or
angry.
"It wasn't necessary. Haven't you felt his eyes on you while you were
dancing? He thinks you're the most wonderful girl in the world. There
he's right. He'll treasure up every word you speak, every smile you
give him; he'll send himself to sleep picturing ways of saving your
life at the cost of his own. And he'll dream of you all night."
The Seraph's tranquil, unemotional voice had grown so earnest that
Sylvia found herself growing serious in spite of herself.
"I wish you wouldn't discuss me with boys like that," she said, more
to gain time than administer reproof.
"Should I have discussed you?" exclaimed the Seraph. "And would he
have told me? Why can't you, why can't any girl understand the mind of
a boy of fifteen? You'd make such men of them if you'd only take the
trouble. Look at him now, he's thinking out wonderful speeches to make
to you...."
"I _hope_ not," said Sylvia ruefully.
"He'll forget them all when he meets you. I was fifteen once."
"I wonder if you'll ever be more."
The Seraph made no answer.
"That wasn't meant for a snub," said Sylvia reassuringly.
"I know that."
Sylvia looked at him curiously. "Is there anything you _don't_ know?"
she asked as they descended the stairs to the ball-room.
"I don't even know if you're going to let me take you in to supper."
"I'm glad there's something."
"That's not an answer."
"Do you want to?"
"You ought to know that without asking."
"I'm afraid there's a great deal about you I _don't_ know."
Supper was ended and their table deserted before Sylvia put the
question with which I had primed her that afternoon.
"Is there anything I _don't_ know? to use your own words," said the
Seraph evasively.
"That's not an answer, to use yours."
"It's the only answer I can give," he replied, with that curious
expression in his dark eyes that did duty for a smile.
"Why won't you tell me? I'm interested. It's about myself, so I've a
right to know."
"But I can't explain; I don't know. It never happened before."
"Never?"
The Seraph thought over his first meeting with her the previous day.
"Never with any one else," he answered.
Sylvia shook her head in perplexity.
"I don't understand," she said. "Either it was just coincidence and
you were talking without thinking, or else ... I don't know. It's
rather funny. D'you want to smoke? Let's go out on to the terrace."
"The detectives are there."
"No, father said they weren't to appear to-night."
"They're out there."
"How d'you know?"
"I can hear them."
Sylvia looked round at the closed plate-glass windows.
"You _can't_," she said incredulously.
"Will you bet? No, I don't want to rob you. Shall I tell you something
else? You opened a fresh bottle of scent to-night when you dressed for
dinner. It's Chaminade, the same kind that you were using before, but
this is fresher. Had you noticed it?"
The Seraph was considerably less impressed by his powers than Sylvia
appeared to be.
"Anything else?" she asked after a pause.
The Seraph wrinkled his brows in thought.
"Gladys Merivale was coughing last night," he said. "Some one passed
my door at two o'clock and went into her room. I don't know who it
was, but it wasn't you. The coughing stopped for a time, but started
again just before three. Then you passed by and went in."
"How do you know?"
"I heard you."
"You may have heard some one; you didn't know it was me. I went once
and mother went once. You couldn't tell which was which."
The Seraph lit a cigarette and walked with her to the door of the
supper-room.
"Oh, it was your mother?" he said. "Then she went the first time."
"But how do you know?" Sylvia repeated.
"I can't explain, any more than about the car coming back this
morning."
Sylvia shook her head a little uneasily.
"You're abnormal," she pronounced.
"Because I...?"
"Go on."
"Because I know a fraction more about you than other people?"
"Do you?"
"Only a fraction. It would take time to understand you."
"How much? I hate to be thought a sphinx."
"However little I wanted, we should be parted before I got it."
"Why? How? How parted?"
The Seraph shrugged his shoulders.
"Don't ask me to read the future," he said with a sigh.
At the end of the ball I found the Roden boys congratulating
themselves on the success of the evening. I added my quota of praise,
and was pressed to state if I now felt equal to three successive
nights at Commemoration.
"Which reminds me!" Robin exclaimed, flying off at his usual tangent.
"Where's Sylvia? Sylvia, my angel, what about Commem.?"
His sister looked tired but happy, and in some way excited.
"I'll come if you want me," she answered, putting her arm round
Robin's neck and kissing him good-night. "Yes, all right--I will. Oh,
Mr. Rawnsley told me this morning that Mavis wouldn't be able to come,
so you must get another girl."
Robin dropped his voice confidentially.
"See if you can persuade Cynthia to come. And we're still a man
short."
Sylvia looked slowly round the room with thoughtful, unsmiling
eyes--past Culling, past Gartside....
"Will you come, Seraph?" she asked.
Less than a day and a half had passed since I had noticed her practice
of avoiding Christian names. For some reason I had supposed nicknames
to fall into the same category.
CHAPTER V
COMMEMORATION
"Oxford ... the seat of one of the most ancient and
celebrated universities in Europe, is situated amid
picturesque environs at the confluence of the Cherwell
and the Thames.... Oxford is on the whole more attractive
than Cambridge to the ordinary visitor.... The best time
for a visit is the end of the Summer term.... This period
of mingled work and play (the latter predominating) is
named _Commemoration_.... It is almost needless to add
that an introduction to a 'Don' will greatly add to the
visitor's pleasure and profit."
KARL BAEDECKER: "Handbook for Travellers: Great Britain."
Of the weeks that passed between my return to London from Brandon
Court and our departure from London to Oxford, I have only the most
indistinct recollection. My engagement book earned many honourable
scars before I carried it away into my present exile, but for May and
the first half of June there appears a black, undecipherable smudge
that my memory tells me should represent a long succession of late
nights and crowded days. Individual items are blurred out of
recognition; my general sense of the period is that I pretended to be
preternaturally young, and was punished by being made to feel
prematurely old.
It was the busiest part of the London season, and Gladys appeared to
receive cards for an average of three balls a night on five nights of
the week. I accompanied her everywhere, growing gradually broken to
the work and relieved of my more serious responsibilities by the fact
that Philip Roden was too busy at the House to waste his nights in a
ball-room. We seemed to move in the midst of a stage army, the same
few hundred men, women, and dowagers reappearing in an endless
march-past. With the advent of the big hotels, hospitality had changed
in character since the days when I counted myself a Londoner: there
was more of it and it was less hospitable. The rising generation, and
more particularly the female portion of it, seemed to have taken
matters into its own hands.
Regularly each morning, after a late breakfast, Gladys would set me to
write a series of common-form letters: "Dear Mr. Blank," I would say,
"My niece and I shall be so pleased if you will dine with us here
to-night at 8.30 and go on to Lady Anonym's ball." Then Gladys would
bring unknowing guest and unknown hostess into communication. "Can I
speak to Lady Anonym?" I would hear her call down the telephone. "Oh,
good morning! I say, do you think you could _possibly_ do with another
man for your ball to-night? Honest? It _is_ sweet of you. Oh, quite a
nice thing--Mr. Incognito Blank, 101, Utopia Chambers, St. James.
Thanks, most awfully. Oh no, not _him_, he's the most awful stiff;
this is a dear thing. Well, I would have, only he's only just got back
to England, he's been shooting big game...."
This was the retail method. In the case of intimate friends, Gladys
would be encouraged to send in her own list of desirable invitees.
Because I am old-fashioned and unacquainted with English ways, I trust
I am not inaccessible to new ideas. I would carry the policy of
promiscuity to its logical conclusion. An announcement in the _Times_
with draft _ménu_, name of band and programme of music--even a
placard outside Claridge's--would save endless postage and stationery,
and could not pack the ball-room tighter than on a dozen occasions I
remember. Hostesses who believe that numbers are the soul of
hospitality, could be certain beforehand of the success of their
efforts; superior young men would continue to remark, "Society gettin'
very mixed, what?" exactly as they have done ever since I entered my
first ball-room at the age of seventeen. Everybody, in short, would be
pleased.
We saw a good deal of Sylvia during those weeks, as for reasons of her
own she would frequently drop in at Pont Street and conduct her share
of the arrangements over our telephone. Occasionally Gladys would be
called in as an accomplice, I would hear "Mr. Aintree's" name added to
Lady Anonym's list, and Gladys would remark with fine carelessness,
"Oh, just send him the card, if you will; don't bother to say who it
comes from." The Seraph may have suspected, but he never had
documentary proof of the originating cause of some of his invitations.
In making our arrangements for Commemoration, I decided to take the
greater part of my charges to Oxford by road. Robin, of course, was
still in residence, and Philip promised to come down by the first
possible train. Gladys, Sylvia, the Seraph, and a _pis-aller_ of
Robin's named Cynthia Bargrave constituted my flock; we motored
quietly down to Henley, where we lunched and chartered a houseboat for
the Regatta, and arrived in Oxford with ample time for the three girls
to have a comfortable rest before dinner. I made rather a point of
this, as they were going to have three very tiring days and would
naturally wish to look their best; moreover, I wanted to roam round
the town with the Seraph.
Even Oxford, that I thought could never alter, had changed during my
years of absence. The little, nameless back-street colleges I would
gladly sacrifice to the Destroyer, for they serve no purpose beyond
that of breeding proctors, and I know we counted it an indignity to be
fined by the scion of a college we had to reach by cab. But the High
should have been inviolate; there wanted no new colleges breaking
through its immemorial sides.... Univ. men, standing at their lodge
gate and looking northward, have told me the High already contains one
college in excess.
While the Seraph sought out Robin's rooms in Canterbury, I wandered
through the college--guiltily, I admit--looking for traces of a
popular outbreak that occurred when a ball took place at Blenheim and
House men asked in vain for leave to attend it. In time I came to my
own old rooms in Tom, and gazed rather in sorrow than anger at the
strange new name painted over the door. Twice my fingers went to the
handle, twice I told myself that "Mr. R.F. Davenant" had as much right
to privacy as I should have claimed in his place.... I wandered out
through Tom Gate, across St. Aldates, and down Brewer Street to those
pleasant digs in Micklem Hall, where I once spent an all-too-short
twelve months. Then I returned to college, crept furtively back to the
old familiar door, knocked, listened, entered....
"R.F. Davenant" was far more civil than I should have been at a like
intrusion. He showed me round the rooms, offered me whisky and
cigarettes, wanted to know when I had been up, whether I was going to
the Gaudy.... We were friends in a minute. I liked his fair,
neatly-parted hair and clean, fresh colouring; I liked his Meissonier
artist proofs; I liked the way the left back leg of the sofa
collapsed unless you underpinned it with a Liddle and Scott. Not a
thing was changed but the photographs on the mantelpiece. I walked
over and surveyed them critically. Then one of those things happened
that convince me an idle Quixotic Providence is watching over my least
movements: I was staring at the picture of a girl on horseback when he
volunteered the information that it was his sister.
"Your married sister?" I suggested.
"Do you know her?"
He fed me on Common-room tea and quarter-pound wedges of walnut cake.
Joyce was coming up for two of the three balls I was attending, coming
unprovided with partners to chaperone some girl who had captured her
brother's wandering fancy. These elder sisters earn more crowns than
they are ever accorded; it seemed that Joyce who trampled on the world
would stretch herself out to be trampled on by her heedless only
brother. I wonder wherein the secret lies.
"Come and dine," suggested Dick Davenant.
I told him of my own party, and lost no time in working the Cumberland
days with his father for all they were worth. What happened to the
Seraph I never discovered. As I hurried back to the Randolph for
dinner, Robin met me with an apology in advance for the dull evening
before me.
"'Fraid you'll have rather a rotten time," he opined. "I wish you had
let me find you some old snag or other."
"I shall be all right, Robin," I said.
"There's sure to be bridge _somewhere_. Or look here, what about a
roulette-board? Combine business with pleasure--what?"
"I shall be able to amuse myself," I assured him.
Our dinner that night was one of the gayest meals I have eaten; we
were all expectant, excited, above our usual form--with the single
exception of Philip. If I were a woman, I suppose I should notice
these things; as it was I put his silent preoccupation down to
overwork. When he approached Robin with other-world gentleness and
suggested a stroll up St. Giles after dinner "just to keep me company,
old boy," I ought to have suspected something; but it was not till the
Seraph, smoking a lonely cigar, murmured something about "_Consul
videat ne respublica detrimentum capiat_," that I saw my authority
over Gladys was being threatened.
The girls had been despatched for their last mysterious finishing
touches, and we had the hall of the Randolph to ourselves.
"What the deuce ought I to do, Seraph?" I asked.
"What _can_ you do?"
"I don't know."
"Why do anything?"
That is the question I always ask myself when I have no definite idea
what is expected of me.
"I wish he'd had the consideration to wait till my brother came back,"
I grumbled.
"These little emotional crises never _do_ wait till we're ready for
them, do they?"
"From the fulness of the heart...."
"Oh, pardon me, I was not speaking of myself."
"I thought you were."
The Seraph shook his head at me.
"No, you didn't. You aren't thinking of me, or Gladys, or Philip, or
any one but your own self."
I hypnotised a waiter into taking my order for Benedictine.
"No emotional crises have come _my_ way," I protested.
"Something very curious has happened to you since we parted this
afternoon."
I accounted for every moment of my time since our arrival in Oxford.
"Why didn't you tell me that before?" he exclaimed when I mentioned my
chance meeting with Dick Davenant. "Joyce coming up for the ball? Will
you...? No! sorry."
"Will I what?"
"It's no business of mine."
"Why d'you start talking about it, then? Will I what?"
The Seraph knocked the ash off his cigar, finished his coffee, and sat
silent. I repeated my question.
"Well...." he hesitated nervously. "Are you going to propose to her
to-night?"
"Really, Seraph!"
"You're going to--some time or other...."
"Don't talk nonsense!"
"...I was wondering if it would be to-night."
I felt myself growing rather annoyed and uncomfortable.
"Not very good form to talk like this," I said stiffly. "After all,
she's a friend of yours and mine. A joke's all very well...."
"But I'm quite serious!"
"My dear Seraph, d'you appreciate that I've met the girl once--a few
weeks ago--and once only since she was a child of five?"
"Oh yes. And do you remember my telling you what was bringing you back
to England? Do you remember the impression she made on you that night?
If you're going to marry her...."
"Seraph, drop it!"
He withdrew into his shell, and we smoked without speaking until I
began to be sorry for snubbing him.
"I didn't mean to be rude," I said apologetically. "But she's a nice
girl; I may see her to-night for all I know to the contrary, and this
coupling of names.... You see my point?"
The Seraph suddenly developed a nervous, excited earnestness.
"Let me give you a word of advice. If you're going to propose to
her--oh, all right; if X. is going to propose to her, he'd better do
it now--before the crash comes. There's going to be a very big crash;
she's going down under it. If you--if X. proposed now, she might be
got out of the way before it's too late. You--X. won't like to see the
woman he's going to marry...."
"X. marries her then?" I asked in polite incredulity. "Oh, he should
certainly lose no time."
"She may not accept you at once."
"Come and get your coat, Seraph."
"But she will later."
"Come and get your coat," I repeated.
"Ah--you don't believe me--well...."
I gave him my two hands and pulled him out of his chair.
"Can you foretell the future?" I asked with a scepticism worthy of
Nigel Rawnsley. "What time shall I breakfast to-morrow? What shall I
have for supper to-night? What tie shall I wear next Friday
fortnight?"
The Seraph shook his head without answering.
"Very well, then," I said decisively.
"But you don't know either."
Of course he was right.
"I may not know _now_," I said, "but I shall make up my mind in due
course, and do whatever I've made up my mind to do--whether it's
choosing a tie or...."
"Proposing to Joyce. Exactly. I've never pretended to tell you more
than what's in your own mind."
"You talked about the woman X. was going to _marry_, not merely
propose to. The last word doesn't lie with X."
"True. But if I know what's passing in Joyce's mind?"
"Does she know herself?"
"No! That's the wonderful thing about a woman's mind, it's so
disconnected. She's none of a man's faculty of taking a resolve,
seeing it, acting on it.... That's why I said she might not accept you
at once."
"You know her mind better than she does?"
As my interest rose, the Seraph became studiedly vague.
"I know nothing," he answered. "I merely suggest the possibility that
a woman may form a subconscious resolution and not recognise it as
part of her mental stock-in-trade for weeks, months, years.... If you
wait for her to recognise it, you may find you come too late; if you
come before she recognises it, you may find you've come too early."
I helped him into his coat as the three girls descended the stairs.
"Not a very cheerful prospect for X.," I suggested.
"X. had better help her to recognise her sub-conscious ideas," he
answered.
I felt a boy of twenty as we drove down St. Aldates, hurried across
Tom Quad, shed our wraps and struggled into the hall. The place was
half full already, and the orchestra, with every instrument duplicated
and Lorino thundering away at a double grand, had started an opening
extra. Youthful stewards, their shirt-fronts crossed with blue and
white ribbons of office, hurried to and fro in excessive, callow
zeal; bright among the black coats shone the full regimentals of the
Bullingdon; while stray followers of Pytchley, Bicester and V.W.H.
contributed their colour to the rainbow blaze.
My charges dutifully spilt a drop from their cups in my honour, but at
the end of an hour they were free to follow their own various
inclinations. There was no sign of Joyce in the ball-room, but I found
her at length by the stair-head, gratefully drinking in the fresh air,
flushed--or so I fancied--and occasionally passing a hand across eyes
that looked tired and strained. I gave her some champagne and led her
to her brother's room. Two armchairs that I had purchased in the
luxury-loving twenties seemed somehow to have withstood seven
undergraduate generations.
"You were quite the last person I expected to find here," I said,
after telling her of my meeting with Dick.
"I was quite the last person a lot of people expected to find here,"
she answered.
"Dick has a lot to be thankful for. So--for that matter--have others."
"Dear old Dick! he has a lot to put up with, if that's what you mean.
If he hadn't been a steward, they wouldn't have admitted me. Oh, the
staring and the glaring and the pointing and the whispering!"
I now appreciated the reason of the bright eyes and pink cheeks.
"If you _will_ espouse unpopular political causes," I began.
"I'm not complaining! _This_ was nothing to what I've been through in
the past. It's all in the day's work. What are you doing in Oxford?"
I helped myself to one of Dick's cigarettes. He kept them just where I
used to keep mine. On second thoughts I put it back and ran my hand
along the under-side of the mantelpiece to the hidden shelf where I
used to keep cigars maturing. Dick had followed my admirable
precedent. I commandeered a promising Intimidad, feeling all the while
like the ghost of my twenty-year-old self revisiting the haunts of my
affection.
"At the moment I met you, I was feeling very old and miserable," I
said, when I had told her of the party committed to my charge. "Time
was when I counted for something in this place, porters touched their
hats to me, I could be certain of an apple in the back of the neck as
I walked through the Quad. Now the hall is filled with young kings who
know not Joseph. There are not twelve men or maidens who recognise
me."
"Perhaps they don't know you."
"That," I said, "is not very helpful."
"I'm sorry. There are about two hundred people in that hall who know
me, but only four recognised me. You were one. I'm grateful."
"But what did you expect?"
"I wasn't sure. You came with the enemy."
It was time for me to define my attitude of political isolation. I
told her--what was no more than the truth--that I owed no allegiance
to king, country, church, or party. I have never been interested in
politics, and twenty years' absence from England have made me nothing
if not a citizen of the world. I cared nothing for the great franchise
question, it was a matter of indifference to me whether the vote was
granted or withheld. On the other hand, I have a great love of peace
and comfort, and resent any effort to force me into a position of
hostility.
"You won't convert me, Joyce," I said. "No more will the Rodens. I
refuse to mix myself up in the miserable business. Friends and
enemies, indeed! I have no enemies, but as a friend I wish I could
persuade you to accept the _fait accompli_. You're up against _force
majeure_, you'll have to give in sooner or later. Why not sooner?"
"Why give up at all?"
"You're striking at an immovable body."
"What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable body?"
"Is it an irresistible force?"
"Have you seen Mavis Rawnsley the last few weeks?"
The question was asked with fearless, impudent abruptness.
"I don't know her to speak to," I said. "You remember we caught sight
of her that night the Seraph took us to the theatre."
"The night I undertook to convert the idlest man in the northern
hemisphere? Yes."
"The night that same idler undertook to re-convert you. I've not seen
her since."
"Has her father?"
"You must ask him."
"I will. In fact, I have already. 'Where is Miss Rawnsley? A rumour
reaches us as we are going to press....' You'll find it all in this
week's _New Militant_, I had such fun writing it."
"What was the rumour?"
"We--ell!" Joyce put her head on one side and pretended to spur her
memory. "Some one said Mavis Rawnsley had disappeared. Nothing in
that, of course; _you_'ve disappeared before now. Then some one else
said she was being held to ransom till her father was converted to the
suffrage. That interested me. None of the papers said anything about
it; you'd have thought Mr. Rawnsley was making a mystery of it.
However, I wanted to know, so I'm asking the question in the leading
article. Perhaps he'll write and tell me. Do you love me enough to
give me a match?"
I lit her cigarette and talked to her for her soul's good.
"As I say, my law's pretty rusty," I told her in conclusion, "but you
may take it as quite certain that the penalty for abduction is rather
severe."
"Brutally," Joyce assented with unabated cheerfulness. "But you've got
to catch your criminal before you can imprison him."
"Or her."
"And you can't catch without evidence."
I wandered round the room in search of two cushions. I found only one,
but women do not need cushions to the same extent as men.
"That's the most banal remark I've ever heard from you," I told her.
"There never was a criminal yet that didn't think he'd left no traces,
never one that didn't think he was equal to the strain of sitting
waiting to be arrested. They all end in the same way, get frightened
or become reckless----"
"Which am I?"
"Neither as yet. You'll become reckless, because I don't think you
know what fear means."
"Reckless! Me reckless! If I have a glass roof put to the editorial
room of the _New Militant_, will you climb up and see my moderating
influence at work? If it hadn't been for me, we should have been
prosecuted over the first number."
"I suppose that's Mrs. Millington?" I hazarded. An echo of her fiery
pamphlets and speeches had reached me during the heyday of the arson
and sabotage campaign.
"What's in a name?" Joyce asked sweetly.
"Nothing at all. I agree. You tell me there's _some one_ who has to be
restrained. I tell you you'll be arrested the day after your
restraining influence is withdrawn...."
Joyce bowed her assent.
"And that will happen when you're invalided home from the front."
Joyce bowed again. "Me that never had a day's illness in my life," I
heard her murmur.
"It'll be a new experience, and you'll have it very shortly if I know
anything of what a woman looks like when she's overworked,
over-worried, over-excited. However fit you may be in other ways,
you're man's inferior in physical stamina. For the ordinary fatigues
of life...."
"But this wasn't!" The interruption came quickly in a tone that had
lost its early banter. "Elsie's case comes on at the end of this week.
I've been with her, I didn't want to come to-night, but she made
me--so as not to disappoint Dick. It's not very pleasant to sit
watching any one going through.... However, don't let's talk about it.
You were giving me good advice. I love good advice. It's cheap...."
"And so very filling? I'll give no more."
"Don't stop, it's a wonderful index. As long as people give me good
advice, I know I need never trouble to ask them for anything more."
I weighed the remark rather deliberately.
"You were nearer being spiteful then than I've ever heard you," I
said.
"But wasn't it true? The only three people I can depend on not to give
me good advice are Elsie, Dick and the Seraph."
"The only three who'll give you anything more?"
"Among the non-politicals. I've got politicals who'd go through fire
and water for me," she declared proudly.
"I can believe it. But only those three among the rest?"
"Those three." She sat looking me in the eyes for a moment, then a
mischievous smile of commiseration broke over her face. "My friend,
you're not suggesting _yourself_?"
"I'm waiting to be asked."
"It would be waste of time. You've not been living your own sinful
selfish life all these years for nothing. If a crash ever came--it's
kindly meant, but I should have to put you under instruction for six
months before I could be certain of you."
"You won't get six months."
"Then it's hardly worth starting, is it? In any case we shall win
without needing to call in outside help. What about getting back to
the ball-room?"
I exhibited my unfinished cigar.
"When you're tired of oakum and a plank bed," I began....
"Caught, tried _and_ condemned. If you want to be useful, you musn't
leave it as late as that."
"The sooner the better."
"I'll come as soon as there's a warrant out."
"Promise?"
"Faithfully. But there won't be any warrant if the cause succeeds."
"I pray you'll fail," was my fervent answer.
Joyce threw her cigarette petulantly into the fireplace.
"You've spoilt _every_thing by that!"
"My help was offered to you, not to your ridiculous cause."
"We can't be separated."
"Will you bet?"
"Yes."
"What?"
"Anything you like!"
She sprang up and faced me with the light of battle in her eyes. The
flush had come back to her cheeks, her lips were parted, and the rope
of pearls round her neck rose and fell with her quick, excited
breathing. I shall not easily forget the picture she presented at that
moment. The room was lit by a single central globe, and against the
background of dark oak panels her black dress was almost invisible.
Standing outside the white circle of light, her slim fragile body was
hidden, but through the shadows I could see the shimmer of her spun
gold hair and the wonderful line of her gleaming white arms and
shoulders.
"Anything you like!" she repeated in confident gay challenge.
"I hold you to that."
Fifteen years ago I bought a scarab-ring in Luxor. After losing it
once a day for a fortnight, I had it fitted with ingenious couplings
so designed that when I caught it in a glove the couplings drew tight
and clamped the ring to the finger. When last I found myself in Egypt,
my Arab goldsmith had been gathered to his fathers, and the secret of
those couplings is vested in myself. Three London and two Parisian
jewellers have told me they could unravel the mystery by cutting the
ring to pieces. Short of that, they confessed themselves baffled.
"Hold out your hand, Joyce," I said. "No, the other one. There!"
I slipped the ring on to her third finger, stepped back to the table,
and lit a cigarette. This last was purely for effect.
Joyce looked at the ring and tried to move it.
"No good," I said. "You may cut the ring, which would be a pity
because it's unique; and it's not yours till you've won the wager. Or
you may amputate the finger, which also would be a pity, as that too
... well, anyway, it won't be yours to amputate if I win the bet."
Again she tried to move the ring, again without success.
"Will you take it off, please?"
I shook my head.
"You said I might fix the wager."
"Take it off, please!" she repeated, frowning disapproval upon me.
Unfortunately, like Mrs. Hilary Musgrave, she looks uncommonly well
when she disapproves.
"Shall we go back now?" I suggested. "I've finished my cigar."
"A joke may be carried too far," she exclaimed, stamping her foot as I
remember seeing her stamp it as a wicked, flaxen-haired child of five.
"Heaven witness I'm not joking!" I protested. "Nothing I could say
would move you in your present frame of mind; the wager gave me my
chance. It's a ring against a hand, and on the day that sees you
separated from your infernal cause, I come to claim my reward. As long
as you and the cause remain unseparated you may keep the ring. I'm
backing my luck; I always do, and it never fails me."
Joyce gave the ring a last despairing tug, and then with some
difficulty drew the finger of her glove over it.
"How long must I wait before I may have the ring cut?" she asked.
I had not considered that.
"Till my death?" I suggested.
"Sooner than that, I hope."
"Oh, so do I. I want to win the wager and get my stakes back."
Joyce passed out before me into the quadrangle, buttoning her glove as
she went. I was feeling elated by what had passed, elated and quite
deliciously surprised to find how short-lived her anger had been.
"I'm afraid I'm bound up with the cause more intimately than you
think," she began with unexpected gentleness. "For--let me see--three
years now people have been trying to show me the error of my ways, and
I go on just the same. Men and women, friends and relations, a
Suffragan Bishop...."
"Quite a proper distinction," I interrupted. "Neither fish, flesh,
fowl, nor good red herring."
"...and the only result is that I sink daily deeper into the mire."
"But this is where I come in."
"Too late, I'm afraid. Listen. I used to have a little money of my
own. I've sold out every stock and share I possessed to help found the
_New Militant_. I'm living on the salary they pay me to edit it. That
looks like business, doesn't it?"
I straightened my tie, buttoned the last button of my gloves, and
mounted the first step of the Hall stairs.
"Living out in the East," I said, "I have learnt the virtue of
infinite patience."
Joyce remained silent. It occurred to me that I had left an important
question unasked.
"When I win my wager," I began.
"You won't."
"Assume I do. No one likes losing bets, but would you seriously object
to the consequences?"
Joyce gave me the wonderful dawn of a smile before replying.
"I've never given the matter a thought," she answered.
"Subconsciously?" I suggested in a manner worthy of the Seraph.
She shook her head.
"Well, give it a thought now," I begged.
"It wouldn't make much difference whether I objected or not."
"If you honestly object, if you think the whole thing's a joke in
questionable taste, I'll take the ring off here and now."
Joyce began to unbutton her glove, then stopped and looked at me. I
suppose my voice must have shown I was speaking seriously; her eyes
were soft and kind.
"I think any girl 'ud be very lucky...." she began. I bowed, and as I
did so an imp of mischief took possession of her tongue. "...very
lucky indeed--to engage your roving affection."
"That wasn't what you started to say."
"I never know what I _am_ going to say. That's why I'm so good on a
platform."
"Shall I take the ring off?"
"I prefer to win it in fair fight."
"If you can," I rejoined, as we pressed our way into the bright warmth
of the ball-room.
My charges appeared to be profiting by my absence. Couple after couple
floated by with touching heads and dreamy eyes; half-way down the room
Philip was whispering in Gladys' ear and making her smile; I caught a
glimpse of Robin and Cynthia; then Sylvia and the Seraph glided past.
"Don't they look sweet together?" said Joyce, half to herself, as our
faces were subjected to a quick, searching glance.
"What about a turn before supper?" I suggested.
"Am I having it with you?"
"If you will."
"I should like to."
We started round the room, half-way through the waltz. Joyce was a
beautiful dancer, easy, light, and rhythmical. It was too good to
spoil with talking; I contented myself with one final remark.
"After all," I said, "you may as well start getting used to me."
CHAPTER VI
THE SECOND ROUND
"One sleeps, indeed, and wakes at intervals,
We know, but waking's the main part with us,
And my provision's for life's waking part.
Accordingly, I use heart, head and hand
All day, I build, scheme, study and make friends;
And when night overtakes me, down I lie,
Sleep, dream a little, and get done with it,
The sooner the better, to begin afresh.
What's midnight doubt before the dayspring's faith?
You, the philosopher that disbelieve,
That recognise the night, give dreams their weight--
To be consistent--you should keep your bed,
Abstain from healthy acts that prove you man,
For fear you drowse perhaps at unawares!
And certainly at night you'll sleep and dream,
Live through the day and bustle as you please.
And so you live to sleep as I to wake,
To unbelieve as I to still believe?
Well, and the common sense o' the world calls you
Bedridden,--and its good things come to me."
ROBERT BROWNING: "Bishop Blougram's Apology."
The Bullingdon Ball took place on the Tuesday night, and Joyce
returned to town the following morning. Her brother may have mentioned
the time, or it may have been pure coincidence that I should be buying
papers and watching the trains when she arrived at the station with
the girl she was chaperoning. We met as friends and exchanged papers:
I gave her the _Morning Post_ and received the _New Militant_ in
return. As the train slipped away from the platform, she waved
farewell with a carefully gloved left hand. Then Dick and I strolled
back to the House.
In drowsy, darkened chamber Robin was sleeping the sleep of the just.
As I voyaged round his rooms, I reflected that undergraduate humour
changes little through the ages, and in Oxford as elsewhere the
unsuspecting just falls easy prey to wakeful, prowling injustice. An
enemy had visited that peaceful home of slumber. Half-hidden by
disordered bed-clothes, a cold bath prematurely awaited Robin's foot,
and on his table was spread a repast such as no right-thinking man
orders for himself after two nights' heavy dancing. Moist, indecorous
slabs of cold boiled beef, beer for six, two jars of piccalilli and a
round of over-ripe Gorgonzola cheese, offered piteous appeal to a
jaded, untasting palate. Suspended from the overmantel--that soul
might start on equal terms with body--hung the pious aspiration--"God
Bless our Home."
"Garton, for a bob!" Robin exclaimed when I described the condition of
his rooms.
Flinging the bed-clothes aside, he fell heavily into the bath,
extricated himself to the accompaniment of low, vehement muttering
that may have been a prayer, and bounded across the landing to render
unto Garton the things that were Garton's. I followed at a
non-committal distance, and watched the disposal of two pounds of
boiled beef in unsuspected corners of Garton's rooms. Three slices
were hidden in the tobacco jar, the rest impartially distributed
behind Garton's books--to mature and strengthen during sixteen weeks
of Long Vacation. Balancing the jug of beer on the door-top--whence it
fell and caved in the fraudulent white head of a venerable
scout--Robin hastened back to his own quarters and sported the oak.
"I was thinking of a touch of lunch on the Cher," he observed,
exchanging his dripping pyjamas for a dressing-gown and making for a
window-seat commanding Canterbury Gate, a cigarette in one hand and a
Gorgonzola cheese in the other. "If you wouldn't mind toddling round
to Phil and the Seraph and routing the girls out, we might all meet at
the House barge at one. I'll cut along and dress as soon as I've given
Garton a little nourishment. I suppose the pickles 'ud kill him," he
added with a regretful glance at the two-pound glass jars.
I communicated the rendezvous to Philip, threw an eye over the "Where
is Miss Rawnsley?" article as I crossed the Quad, and dropped anchor
in the Seraph's rooms. His quaint streak of femininity showed itself
in the bowls of "White Enchantress" carnations with which the tables
and mantelpiece were adorned. A neat pile of foolscap covered with
shorthand characters indicated early rising and studious method. I
found him working his way through the _Times_ and _Westminster
Gazette_ for the last three days.
"I suppose there is no news?" I said when I had told him Robin's
arrangements for the day and described the Battle of the Beef.
"Nothing to-day," he answered. "Have you seen yesterday's _Times_?"
I had been far too busy with Joyce and my three wards to spare a
moment for the papers. I now read for the first time that the Prime
Minister had moved for the appropriation of all Private Members' days.
The Poor Law Reform Bill would engage the attention of the House for
the remainder of the Session, to the exclusion of Female Suffrage and
every other subject.
"That's Rawnsley's answer to _this_," I said, giving the Seraph my
copy of the _New Militant_.
"I wonder what the answer of the _New Militant_ will be to Rawnsley,"
he murmured when he had read the article.
"That is for you to say," I told him. "You read the Heavens and
interpret dreams and forecast the future...."
"Fortunately I can't."
This was an unexpected point of view.
"Wouldn't you if you could?" I asked.
"Would any one go on living if he didn't cheat himself into believing
the future was not going to be quite as black as the present?"
This was not the right frame of mind for a man who had spent two
nights dancing with Sylvia--to the exclusion of every one else, and I
told him so.
"Come along to the Randolph," he exclaimed impatiently. "To-day,
to-night; and to-morrow all will be over. I was a fool to come. I
don't know why I did."
We picked up our hats and strolled into King Edward Street.
"You came because Sylvia invited you," I reminded him. "I heard the
invitation. Young Rawnsley was not there, but Culling and Gartside
were, and a dozen more I don't know by name. Any of them might have
been chosen instead, but--they weren't. You should be more grateful
for your advantages, my young friend."
"I'm not."
I linked my arm in his, and tried to find out what was upsetting him.
"You've been having some senseless, needless quarrel with her...." I
hazarded.
"How can two people quarrel when they've not a single point in common?
Our lives are on parallel lines, continue them indefinitely and
they'll never meet. Therefore--it's a mistake to bring the parallels
so close together that one can see the other."
For a moment I wondered whether he had put his fortune to the test and
received a rebuff.
"Does Sylvia think your lives are on parallel lines?" I asked.
"What experience or imagination do you think a girl like that's got?
It never occurs to them that everybody's not turned out of the same
machine as themselves, with the same ideas, beliefs, upbringing,
position, means. D'you suppose Sylvia appreciates that she spends more
money on dress in six months than I earn in a year? Can she imagine
that I hate and despise all the little conventions that she wouldn't
transgress for all the wealth of the Indies? The doctrines she's
learnt from her mother, the doctrines she'll want to teach her
children--can she imagine that I regard them as so much witchcraft
that I wouldn't imperil my soul by asking any sane child to believe?
I'm an infidel, a penniless, unconventional Bohemian, and she--well,
you know the atmosphere of Brandon Court. What's the good of our going
on meeting?"
"Nigel is neither infidel, unconventional, nor Bohemian," I said.
"Moreover, he stands on the threshold of a big career...."
"I daresay," said the Seraph as I paused.
"Nigel was not invited. Gartside may be an infidel if he ever troubles
to think of such things; he is certainly not penniless or Bohemian. He
is a large-framed, large-hearted hero, with every worldly advantage a
girl could desire. Gartside was not invited. No more were the others.
You were."
"She hadn't known me two days; perhaps two days aren't long enough to
find me out."
"Feminine intuition...." I began.
"Feminine intuition's a woman's power of jumping to wrong conclusions
quicker than men. Unless you want to get yourself into trouble, you'd
better not march into Sylvia's presence with a _New Militant_ in your
hand."
I thanked him for the reminder, and bequeathed the offending sheet to
the Martyrs' Memorial. The heavy type of the headline, "Where is Miss
Rawnsley?" reminded me of our earlier conversation.
"I shan't be sorry to get rid of my charges," I remarked. "They're a
responsibility in these troublous times."
"Sylvia's in no danger," he answered with great confidence.
"I'm not so sure."
"She's absolutely safe."
"How do you know?"
He looked at me doubtfully, and the confidence died out of his eyes.
"I don't. It's--just an opinion."
"Even if you're right, there's still Gladys," I said.
"I'd forgotten her."
"She's a fair mark."
"I suppose so."
"Though not as good as Sylvia."
"I assure you Sylvia's in no danger."
"But how do you know?" I repeated.
"I tell you; it's only an opinion."
"But you don't express any opinion about Gladys."
"How could I?"
"How can you about Sylvia?"
He hesitated, flushed, opened his lips and shut them again in his old
tantalising way.
"I don't know," he answered as we entered the Randolph, and walked to
the end of the hall where the three girls were awaiting us.
Robin had provided an imposing flotilla for our accommodation. His own
punt was reserved for Cynthia, himself, and the luncheon-baskets; a
mysterious reconciliation had placed Garton's at the disposal of
Philip, Gladys, and myself, while Sylvia and the Seraph were stowed
away in a Canadian canoe, detached by act of sheer piracy from the
adjoining Univ. barge. We took the old course through Mesopotamia and
over the Rollers, mooring for luncheon half a mile above the Cherwell
Hotel. Hunger and a sense of duty secured my presence for that meal
and tea; in the interval I retired for a siesta. Distance, I find,
lends enchantment to a chaperon.
It was in my absence that Philip asked Gladys to marry him. On my
reappearance at tea-time, Robin shouted the news across a not
inconsiderable section of Oxfordshire. I affected the usual surprise,
warned Philip that he must await my brother's approval, and shook
hands with him avuncularly. Then I watched the orgy of kissing that
seems inseparable from announcements of this kind. A mathematician
would work out the possible combinations in two minutes, but his
calculation would, as ever, be upset by the intrusion of the personal
equation, for Robin kissed Gladys not once, but many times, less with
a view to welcoming her as a sister than from a reasonable belief that
such ill-timed assiduity would exasperate her elder brother.
In time it occurred to some one to make tea, and at six o'clock the
flotilla started home. Robin ostentatiously transferred me from
Philip's punt to his own, and with equal ostentation announced his
intention of starting last so as to round up the laggards. The
Canadian canoe shot gracefully ahead, and was soon lost to view; a
fast stream was running, and the boat needed little assistance from
the paddle. I have no doubt that in the late afternoon sun, and with
an accompaniment of rippling water gently lapping the sides of the
boat, time passed all too quickly. Fragments of conversation were
disinterred for my benefit in the course of the following weeks, to
set me wondering anew what sympathetic nimbus I must wear that girls
and boys like Sylvia and the Seraph should unlock their hearts for my
inspection.
I gather that Sylvia called for the verdict on the success of their
expedition to Oxford, and that the Seraph found for her, but with
reluctant, qualified judgment.
"You're not sorry you came?" she asked. "Well, what's lacking? I'm
responsible for bringing you here; I want everything to be quite
perfect."
"Everything _is_ perfect, Sylvia."
She shook her head.
"_Some_thing's wrong. You're moody and silent and troubled, just like
you were the first time we met. D'you remember that night? You looked
as if you thought I was going to bite you. I don't bite, Seraph. Tell
me what's the matter, there's still one night more; I want to make you
glad you came."
"You can't make me gladder than I am. But you can't find roses without
thorns. I wish we weren't all going back to-morrow."
"It's only to London."
"I know, but it'll all be different."
"But why?"
"I don't know, but it _will_ be. These three days wouldn't have been
so glorious if I hadn't remembered every moment of the time that they
were--just three days."
Shipping his paddle, he lay back in the boat and plunged his arms up
to the elbow in the cool, reedy water. Sylvia roused him with a
challenge.
"Four days would have bored you?"
"Have you ever met the man who _was_ bored by four days of your
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