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Simon the Jester

by William John Locke · English · Gutenberg #3828 · 565,780 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Simon the Jester

Author: William John Locke


        
Release date: April 13, 2006 [eBook #3828]
                Most recently updated: March 12, 2018

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3828

Credits: Produced by Dagny; John Bickers; David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SIMON THE JESTER ***




Produced by Dagny; John Bickers





SIMON THE JESTER


By William J. Locke




CHAPTER I

I met Renniker the other day at the club. He is a man who knows
everything--from the method of trimming a puppy's tail for a dog-show,
without being disqualified, to the innermost workings of the mind of
every European potentate. If I want information on any subject under
heaven I ask Renniker.

“Can you tell me,” said I, “the most God-forsaken spot in England?”

Renniker, being in a flippant mood, mentioned a fashionable
watering-place on the South Coast. I pleaded the seriousness of my
question.

“What I want,” said I, “is a place compared to which Golgotha, Aceldama,
the Dead Sea, the Valley of Jehoshaphat, and the Bowery would be leafy
bowers of uninterrupted delight.”

“Then Murglebed-on-Sea is what you're looking for,” said Renniker. “Are
you going there at once?”

“At once,” said I.

“It's November,” said he, “and a villainous November at that; so you'll
see Murglebed-on-Sea in the fine flower of its desolation.”

I thanked him, went home, and summoned my excellent man Rogers.

“Rogers,” said I, “I am going to the seaside. I heard that Murglebed
is a nice quiet little spot. You will go down and inspect it for me and
bring back a report.”

He went blithe and light-hearted, though he thought me insane; he
returned with the air of a serving-man who, expecting to find a
well-equipped pantry, had wandered into a charnel house.

“It's an awful place, sir. It's sixteen miles from a railway station.
The shore is a mud flat. There's no hotel, and the inhabitants are like
cannibals.”

“I start for Murglebed-on-Sea to-morrow,” said I.

Rogers started at me. His loose mouth quivered like that of a child
preparing to cry.

“We can't possibly stay there, sir,” he remonstrated.

“_We_ are not going to try,” I retorted. “I'm going by myself.”

His face brightened. Almost cheerfully he assured me that I should find
nothing to eat in Murglebed.

“You can amuse yourself,” said I, “by sending me down a daily hamper of
provisions.”

“There isn't even a church,” he continued.

“Then you can send me down a tin one from Humphreys'. I believe they can
supply one with everything from a tin rabbit-hutch to a town hall.”

He sighed and departed, and the next day I found myself here, in
Murglebed-on-Sea.

On a murky, sullen November day Murglebed exhibits unimagined horrors
of scenic depravity. It snarls at you malignantly. It is like a bit of
waste land in Gehenna. There is a lowering, soap-suddy thing a mile away
from the more or less dry land which local ignorance and superstition
call the sea. The interim is mud--oozy, brown, malevolent mud. Sometimes
it seems to heave as if with the myriad bodies of slimy crawling eels
and worms and snakes. A few foul boats lie buried in it.

Here and there, on land, a surly inhabitant spits into it. If you
address him he snorts at you unintelligibly. If you turn your back to
the sea you are met by a prospect of unimagined despair. There are
no trees. The country is flat and barren. A dismal creek runs miles
inland--an estuary fed by the River Murgle. A few battered cottages, a
general shop, a couple of low public-houses, and three perky red-brick
villas all in a row form the city, or town, or village, or what you
will, of Murglebed-on-Sea. Renniker is a wonderful man.

I have rented a couple of furnished rooms in one of the villas. It has
a decayed bit of front garden in which a gnarled, stunted stick is
planted, and it is called The Laburnums. My landlord, the owner of
the villas, is a builder. What profits he can get from building in
Murglebed, Heaven alone knows; but, as he mounts a bicycle in the
morning and disappears for the rest of the day, I presume he careers
over the waste, building as he goes. In the evenings he gets drunk at
the Red Cow; so I know little of him, save that he is a red-faced man,
with a Moustache like a tooth-brush and two great hands like hams.

His wife is taciturn almost to dumbness. She is a thick-set,
black-haired woman, and looks at me disapprovingly out of the corner of
her eye as if I were a blackbeetle which she would like to squash under
foot. She tolerates me, however, on account of the tongues and other
sustenance sent by Rogers from Benoist, of which she consumes prodigious
quantities. She wonders, as far as the power of wonder is given to her
dull brain, what on earth I am doing here. I see her whispering to her
friends as I enter the house, and I know they are wondering what I am
doing here. The whole village regards me as a humorous zoological freak,
and wonders what I am doing here among normal human beings.

And what am I doing here--I, Simon de Gex, M.P., the spoilt darling of
fortune, as my opponent in the Labour interest called me during the last
electoral campaign? My disciple and secretary, young Dale Kynnersley,
the only mortal besides Rogers who knows my whereabouts, trembles for
my reason. In the eyes of the excellent Rogers I am horn-mad. What my
constituents would think did they see me taking the muddy air on a soggy
afternoon, I have no conception. Dale keeps them at bay. He also baffles
the curiosity of my sisters, and by his diplomacy has sent Eleanor
Faversham on a huffy trip to Sicily. She cannot understand why I bury
myself in bleak solitude, instead of making cheerful holiday among the
oranges and lemons of the South.

Eleanor is a girl with a thousand virtues, each of which she expects to
find in counterpart in the man to whom she is affianced. Until a week or
two ago I actually thought myself in love with Eleanor. There seemed
a whimsical attraction in the idea of marrying a girl with a thousand
virtues. Before me lay the pleasant prospect of reducing them--say, ten
at a time--until I reached the limit at which life was possible,
and then one by one until life became entertaining. I admired her
exceedingly--a strapping, healthy English girl who looked you straight
in the eyes and gripped you fearlessly by the hand.

My friends “lucky-dog'd” me until I began to smirk to myself at my own
good fortune. She visited the constituency and comported herself as if
she had been a Member's wife since infancy, thereby causing my heart to
swell with noble pride. This unparalleled young person compelled me to
take my engagement almost seriously. If I shot forth a jest, it struck
against a virtue and fell blunted to the earth. Indeed, even now I am
sorry I can't marry Eleanor. But marriage is out of the question.

I have been told by the highest medical authorities that I may manage to
wander in the flesh about this planet for another six months. After that
I shall have to do what wandering I yearn for through the medium of my
ghost. There is a certain humourousness in the prospect. Save for an
occasional pain somewhere inside me, I am in the most robust health.

But this same little pain has been diagnosed by the Faculty as the
symptom of an obscure disease. An operation, they tell me, would kill
me on the spot. What it is called I cannot for the life of me remember.
They gave it a kind of lingering name, which I wrote down on my
shirt-cuff.

The name or characteristics of the thing, however, do not matter a fig.
I have always hated people who talked about their insides, and I am not
going to talk about mine, even to myself. Clearly, if it is only going
to last me six months, it is not worth talking about. But the quaint
fact of its brief duration is worth the attention of a contemplative
mind.

It is in order perfectly to focus this attention that I have come to
Murglebed-on-Sea. Here I am alone with the murk and the mud and my own
indrawn breath of life. There are no flowers, blue sky, smiling eyes,
and dainty faces--none of the adventitious distractions of the
earth. There are no Blue-books. Before the Faculty made their jocular
pronouncement I had been filling my head with statistics on pauper
lunacy so as to please my constituency, in which the rate has increased
alarmingly of late years. Perhaps that is why I found myself their
representative in Parliament. I was to father a Bill on the subject next
session. Now the labour will fall on other shoulders. I interest myself
in pauper lunacy no more. A man requires less flippant occupation for
the premature sunset of his days. Well, in Murglebed I can think, I
can weigh the _pros_ and _cons_ of existence with an even mind, I can
accustom myself to the concept of a Great Britain without Simon de Gex.
M.P.

Of course, when I go I shall “cast one longing, lingering look behind.”
 I don't particularly want to die. In fact, having otherwise the prospect
of an entertaining life, I regard my impending dissolution in the light
of a grievance. But I am not afraid. I shall go through the dismal
formality with a graceful air and as much of a smile on my face as the
pain in my inside will physically permit.

My dear but somewhat sober-sided friend Marcus Aurelius says: “Let death
surprise me when it will, and where it will, I may be _eumoiros_, or
a happy man, nevertheless. For he is a happy man who in his lifetime
dealeth unto himself a happy lot and portion. A happy lot and portion in
good inclinations of the soul, good desires, good actions.”

The word _eumoiros_ according to the above definition, tickles my fancy.
I would give a great deal to be eumoirous. What a thing to say: “I have
achieved eumoiriety,”--namely the quintessence of happy-fatedness dealt
unto oneself by a perfect altruism!

I don't think that hitherto my soul has been very evilly inclined, my
desires base, or my actions those of a scoundrel. Still, the negatives
do not qualify one for eumoiriety. One wants something positive. I
have an idea, therefore, of actively dealing unto myself a happy lot or
portion according to the Marcian definition during the rest of the time
I am allowed to breathe the upper air. And this will be fairly easy;
for no matter how excellently a man's soul may be inclined to the
performance of a good action, in ninety cases out of a hundred he is
driven away from it by dread of the consequences. Your moral teachers
seldom think of this--that the consequences of a good action are often
more disastrous than those of an evil one. But if a man is going to die,
he can do good with impunity. He can simply wallow in practical virtue.
When the boomerang of his beneficence comes back to hit him on the
head--_he won't be there to feel it_. He can thus hoist Destiny with its
own petard, and, besides, being eumoirous, can spend a month or two in a
peculiarly diverting manner. The more I think of the idea the more am
I in love with it. I am going to have a seraph of a time. I am going to
play the archangel.

I shall always have pleasant memories of Murglebed. Such an idea could
not have germinated in any other atmosphere. In the scented groves of
sunny lands there would have been sown Seeds of Regret, which would have
blossomed eventually into Flowers of Despair. I should have gone about
the world, a modern Admetus, snivelling at my accursed luck, without
even the chance of persuading a soft-hearted Alcestis to die for me. I
should have been a dismal nuisance to society.

“Bless you,” I cried this afternoon, waving, as I leaned against a
post, my hand to the ambient mud, “Renniker was wrong! You are not a
God-forsaken place. You are impregnated with divine inspiration.”

A muddy man in a blue jersey and filthy beard who occupied the next post
looked at me and spat contemptuously. I laughed.

“If you were Marcus Aurelius,” said I, “I would make a joke--a short
life and an eumoiry one--and he would have looked as pained as you.”

“What?” he bawled. He was to windward of me.

I knew that if I repeated my observation he would offer to fight me. I
approached him suavely.

“I was wondering,” I said, “as it's impossible to strike a match in this
wind, whether you would let me light my pipe from yours.”

“It's empty,” he growled.

“Take a fill from my pouch,” said I.

The mud-turtle loaded his pipe, handed me my pouch without
acknowledgment, stuck his pipe in his breeches pocket, spat again, and,
deliberately turning his back, on me, lounged off to another post on a
remoter and less lunatic-ridden portion of the shore. Again I laughed,
feeling, as the poet did with the daffodils, that one could not but be
gay in such a jocund company.

There are no amenities or urbanities of life in Murglebed to choke the
growth of the Idea. This evening it flourishes so exceedingly that I
think it safe to transplant it in the alien soil of Q 3, The Albany,
where the good Rogers must be leading an idle existence peculiarly
deleterious to his morals.

This gives one furiously to think. One of the responsibilities of
eumoiriety must be the encouragement and development of virtue in my
manservant.

Also in my young friend and secretary, Dale Kynnersley. He is more to me
than Rogers. I may confess that, so long as Rogers is a sober, honest,
me-fearing valet, in my heart of hearts I don't care a hang about
Rogers's morals. But about those of Dale Kynnersley I do. I care a great
deal for his career and happiness. I have a notion that he is erring
after strange goddesses and neglecting the little girl who is in love
with him. He must be delivered. He must marry Maisie Ellerton, and the
two of them must bring lots of capable, clear-eyed Kynnersleys into the
world. I long to be their ghostly godfather.

Then there's Eleanor Faversham--but if I begin to draw up a programme
I shall lose that spontaneity of effort which, I take it, is one of the
chief charms of dealing unto oneself a happy lot and portion. No; my
soul abhors tabulation. It would make even six months' life as jocular
as Bradshaw's Railway Guide or the dietary of a prison. I prefer to look
on what is before me as a high adventure, and with that prospect in view
I propose to jot down my experiences from time to time, so that when I
am wandering, a pale shade by Acheron, young Dale Kynnersley may have
not only documentary evidence wherewith to convince my friends and
relations that my latter actions were not those of a lunatic, but also,
at the same time, an up-to-date version of Jeremy Taylor's edifying
though humour-lacking treatise on the act of dying, which I am sorely
tempted to label “The Rule and Example of Eumoiriety.” I shall resist
the temptation, however. Dale Kynnersley--such is the ignorance of the
new generation--would have no sense of the allusion. He would shake his
head and say, “Dotty, poor old chap, dotty!” I can hear him. And if, in
order to prepare him, I gave him a copy of the “Meditations,” he
would fling the book across the room and qualify Marcus Aurelius as a
“rotter.”

Dale is a very shrewd fellow, and will make an admirable legislator
when his time comes. Although his highest intellectual recreation is
reiterated attendance at the musical comedy that has caught his fancy
for the moment and his favourite literature the sporting pages of the
daily papers, he has a curious feline pounce on the salient facts of
a political situation, and can thread the mazes of statistics with the
certainty of a Hampton Court guide. His enthusiastic researches (on my
behalf) into pauper lunacy are remarkable in one so young. I foresee
him an invaluable chairman of committee. But he will never become a
statesman. He has too passionate a faith in facts and figures, and has
not cultivated a sense of humour at the expense of the philosophers.
Young men who do not read them lose a great deal of fun.

Well, to-morrow I leave Murglebed for ever; it has my benison.
Democritus returns to London.



CHAPTER II

I was at breakfast on the morning after my arrival in London, when Dale
Kynnersley rushed in and seized me violently by the hand.

“By Jove, here you are at last!”

I smoothed my crushed fingers. “You have such a vehement manner of
proclaiming the obvious, my dear Dale.”

“Oh, rot!” he said. “Here, Rogers, give me some tea--and I think I'll
have some toast and marmalade.”

“Haven't you breakfasted?”

A cloud overspread his ingenuous countenance.

“I came down late, and everything was cold and mother was on edge.
The girls are always doing the wrong things and I never do the right
ones--you know the mater--so I swallowed a tepid kidney and rushed off.”

“Save for her worries over you urchins,” said I, “I hope Lady Kynnersley
is well?”

He filled his mouth with toast and marmalade, and nodded. He is a
good-looking boy, four-and-twenty--idyllic age! He has sleek black hair
brushed back from his forehead over his head, an olive complexion, and
a keen, open, clean-shaven face. He wore a dark-brown lounge suit and
a wine-coloured tie, and looked immaculate. I remember him as the
grubbiest little wretch that ever disgraced Harrow.

He swallowed his mouthful and drank some tea.

“Recovered your sanity?” he asked.

“The dangerous symptoms have passed over,” I replied. “I undertake not
to bite.”

He regarded me as though he were not quite certain, and asked in his
pronounless way whether I was glad to be back in London.

“Yes,” said I. “Rogers is the only human creature who can properly wax
the ends of my moustache. It got horribly limp in the air of Murglebed.
That is the one and only disadvantage of the place.”

“Doesn't seem to have done you much good,” he remarked, scanning me
critically. “You are as white as you were before you went away. Why the
blazes you didn't go to Madeira, or the South of France, or South Africa
I can't imagine.”

“I don't suppose you can,” said I. “Any news?”

“I should think I have! But first let me go through the appointments.”

He consulted a pocket-book. On December 2nd I was to dine with Tanners'
Company and reply to the toast of “The House of Commons.” On the 4th
my constituency claimed me for the opening of a bazaar at Wymington.
A little later I was to speak somewhere in the North of England at a
by-election in support of the party candidate.

“It will be fought on Tariff Reform, about which I know nothing,” I
objected.

“I know everything,” he declared. “I'll see you through. You must buck
up a bit, Simon, and get your name better known about the country. And
this brings me to my news. I was talking to Raggles the other day--he
dropped a hint, and Raggles's hints are jolly well worth while picking
up. Just come to the front and show yourself, and there's a place in the
Ministry.”

“Ministry?”

“Sanderson's going.”

“Sanderson?” I queried, interested, in spite of myself, at these
puerilities. “What's the matter with him?”

“Swelled head. There have been awful rows--this is confidential--and
he's got the hump. Thinks he ought to be the Chancellor of the
Exchequer, or at least First Lord, instead of an Under Secretary. So
he's going to chuck it, before he gets the chuck himself--see?”

“I perceive,” said I, “that your conversational English style is
abominable.”

He lit a cigarette and continued, loftily taking no notice of my rebuke.

“There's bound to be a vacancy. Why shouldn't you fill it? They seem to
want you. You're miles away over the heads of the average solemn duffers
who get office.”

I bowed acknowledgment of his tribute.

“Well, you will buck up and try for it, won't you? I'm awfully proud
of you already, but I should go off my head with joy if you were in the
Ministry.”

I met his honest young eyes as well as I could. How was I going to
convey to his candid intelligence the fact of my speedy withdrawal from
political life without shattering his illusions? Besides, his devotion
touched me, and his generous aspirations were so futile. Office! It was
in my grasp. Raggles, with his finger always on the pulse of the party
machine, was the last man in the world to talk nonsense. I only had to
“buck up.” Yet by the time Sanderson sends in his resignation to the
King of England, I shall have sent in mine to the King of Hosts. I moved
slightly in my chair, and a twinge of the little pain inside brought a
gasp to my throat. But I felt grateful to it. It was saving me from an
unconscionable deal of worry. Fancy going to a confounded office every
morning like a clerk in the City! I was happier at peace. I rose and
warmed myself by the fire. Dale regarded me uncomprehendingly.

“You look as if the prospect bored you to tears. I thought you would be
delighted.”

“_Vanitas vanitatum_,” said I. “_Omnia vanitas_.”

“Rot!” said Dale.

“It's true.”

“I must fetch Eleanor Faversham back from Sicily,” said Dale.

“Don't,” said I.

“Well, I give you up,” he declared, pushing his chair from the table and
swinging one leg across the other. I leaned forward and scrutinised his
ankles.

“What are you looking at?”

“There must be something radically wrong with you, Dale,” I murmured
sympathetically. “It is part of the religion of your generation to wear
socks to match your tie. To-day your tie is wine-coloured and your socks
are green----”

“Good Lord,” he cried, “so they are! I dressed myself anyhow this
morning.”

“What's wrong with you?”

He threw his cigarette impatiently into the fire.

“Every infernal thing that can possibly be. Everything's rotten--but
I've not come here to talk about myself.”

“Why not?”

“It isn't the game. I'm here on your business, which is ever so much
more important than mine. Where are this morning's letters?”

I pointed to an unopened heap on a writing-table at the end of the room.
He crossed and sat down before them. Presently he turned sharply.

“You haven't looked through the envelopes. Here is one from Sicily.”

I took the letter from him, and sighed to myself as I read it. Eleanor
was miserable. The Sicilians were dirty. The Duomo of Palermo did
not come up to her expectations. The Mobray-Robertsons, with whom she
travelled, quarrelled with their food. They had never even heard of
Theocritus. She had a cold in her head, and was utterly at a loss to
explain my attitude. Therefore she was coming back to London.

I wish I could find her a nice tame husband who had heard of Theocritus.
It would be such a good thing for everybody, husband included. For, I
repeat, Eleanor is a young woman of fine character, and the man to whom
she gives her heart will be a fortunate fellow.

While I was reading the letter and meditating on it, with my back to
the fire, Dale plunged into the morning's correspondence with an air of
enjoyment. That is the astonishing thing about him. He loves work.
The more I give him to do the better he likes it. His cronies, who in
raiment, manners, and tastes differ from him no more than a row of pins
differs from a stray brother, regard a writing-chair as a mediaeval
instrument of torture, and faint at the sight of ink. They will put
themselves to all kinds of physical and pecuniary inconvenience in order
to avoid regular employment. They are the tramps of the fashionable
world. But in vain do they sing to Dale of the joys of silk-hatted and
patent-leather-booted vagabondage and deride his habits of industry;
Dale turns a deaf ear to them and urges on his strenuous career. Rogers,
coming in to clear away the breakfast things, was despatched by my young
friend to fetch a portfolio from the hall. It contained, he informed
me, the unanswered letters of the past fortnight with which he had
found himself unqualified to deal. He grasped the whole bundle of
correspondence, and invited me to follow him to the library and start on
a solid morning's work. I obeyed meekly. He sat down at the big table,
arranged the pile in front of him, took a pencil from the tray, and
began:

“This is from Finch, of the _Universal Review_.”

I put my hand on his shoulder.

“Tell him, my boy, that it's against my custom to breakfast at afternoon
tea, and that I hope his wife is well.”

At his look of bewilderment I broke into a laugh.

“He wants me to write a dull article for his stupid paper, doesn't he?”

“Yes, on Poor Law Administration.”

“I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do anything these people ask
me. Say 'No, no, no, no,' to everybody.”

“In Heaven's name, Simon,” he cried, laying down his pencil, “what has
come over you?”

“Old age,” said I.

He uttered his usual interjection, and added that I was only
thirty-seven.

“Age is a relative thing,” I remarked. “Babes of five have been known
to die of senile decay, and I have seen irresponsible striplings of
seventy.”

“I really think Eleanor Faversham had better come back from Sicily.”

I tapped the letter still in my hand. “She's coming.”

“I'm jolly glad to hear it. It's all my silly fault that she went away.
I thought she was getting on your nerves. But you want pulling together.
That confounded place you've been to has utterly upset you.”

“On the contrary,” said I, “it has steadied and amplified my conception
of sublunary affairs. It has shown me that motley is much more
profitable wear than the edged toga of the senator--”

“Oh, for God's sake, dry up,” cried young England, “and tell me what
answers I'm to give these people!”

He seemed so earnest about it that I humoured him; and my correspondents
seemed so earnest that I humoured them. But it was a grim jest. Most of
the matters with which I had to deal appeared so trivial. Only here and
there did I find a chance for eumoiriety. The Wymington Hospital applied
for their annual donation.

“You generally give a tenner,” said Dale.

“This time I'll give them a couple of hundred,” said I.

Dale earmarked the amount wonderingly; but when I ordered him to send
five pounds apiece to the authors of various begging letters he argued
vehemently and quoted the Charity Organisation Society.

“They're frauds, all of them,” he maintained.

“They're poor necessitous devils, at any rate,” said I, “and they want
the money more than I do.”

This was a truth whose significance Dale was far from realising. Of
what value, indeed, is money to me? There is none to whom I can usefully
bequeath my little fortune, my sisters having each married rich men. I
shall not need even Charon's obolus when I am dead, for we have ceased
to believe in him--which is a pity, as the trip across the Styx must
have been picturesque. Why, then, should I not deal myself a happy lot
and portion by squandering my money benevolently during my lifetime?

It behooves me, however, to walk warily in this as in other matters, for
if my actions too closely resemble those of a lunatic at large, trustees
may be appointed to administer my affairs, which would frustrate my
plans entirely.

When my part in the morning's work was over, I informed my secretary
that I would go out and take the air till lunch-time.

“If you've nothing better to do,” said he, “you might run round to
Eccleston Square and see my mother.”

“For any particular reason?”

“She wants to see you. Home for inebriate parrots or something. Gave me
a message for you this morning.”

“I'll wait,” said I, “on Lady Kynnersley with pleasure.”

I went out and walked down the restful covered way of the Albany to
the Piccadilly entrance, and began my taking of the air. It was a soft
November day, full of blue mist, and invested with a dying grace by a
pale sunshine struggling through thin, grey rain-cloud. It was a faded
lady of a day--a lady of waxen cheeks, attired in pearl-grey and
old lace, her dim eyes illumined by a last smile. It gave an air
of unreality to the perspective of tall buildings, and treated with
indulgent irony the passing show of humans--on foot, on omnibuses, in
cabs and motors--turning them into shadow shapes tending no whither.
I laughed to myself. They all fancied themselves so real. They all had
schemes in their heads, as if they were going to live a thousand years.
I walked westwards past the great clubs, moralising as I went, and
feeling the reaction from the excitement of Murglebed-on-Sea. I looked
up at one of my own clubs, a comfortable resting-place, and it struck
me as possessing more attractions than the family vault in Highgate
Cemetery. An acquaintance at the window waved his hand at me. I thought
him a lucky beggar to have that window to stand by when the street will
be flooded with summer sunshine and the trees in the green Park opposite
wave in their verdant bravery. A little further a radiant being, all
chiffons and millinery, on her way to Bond Street for more millinery and
chiffons, smiled at me and put forth a delicately-gloved hand.

“Oh, Mr. de Gex, you're the very man I was longing to see!”

“How simply are some human aspirations satisfied!” said I.

“Farfax”--that's her husband, Farfax Glenn, a Member on my side of the
House--“Farfax and I are making plans already for the Easter recess. We
are going to motor to Athens, and you must come with us. You can tell us
all about everything as we pass by.”

I looked grave. “Easter is late next year.”

“What does that matter? Say you'll come.”

“Alas! my dear Mrs. Glenn,” I said, with a smile, “I have an engagement
at Easter--a very important one.”

“I thought the wedding was not to take place till June.”

“It isn't the wedding,” said I.

“Then break the engagement.”

“It's beyond human power,” said I.

She held up her bracelet, from which dangled some charms.

“I think you're a ----” And she pointed to a little golden pig.

“I'm not,” I retorted.

“What are you, then?”

“I'm a gentleman in a Greek tragedy.”

We laughed and parted, and I went on my way cheered by the encounter.
I had spoken the exact truth, and found amusement in doing so. One has
often extracted humour from the contemplation of the dissolution of
others--that of the giant in “Jack the Giant-killer” for instance, and
the demise of the little boy with the pair of skates in the poem. Why
not extract it from the contemplation of one's own?

The only disadvantage of my position is that it give me, in spite of
myself, an odd sense of isolation from my kind. They are looking forward
to Easters and Junes and summers, and I am not. I also have a fatuous
feeling of superiority in being in closer touch than they with eternal
verities. I must take care that I do not play too much to the gallery,
that I do not grow too conceited over the singularity of my situation,
and arrive at the mental attitude of the criminal whose dominant
solicitude in connection with his execution was that he should be hanged
in his dress clothes. These reflections brought me to Eccleston Square.

Lady Kynnersley is that type of British matron who has children in fits
of absent-mindedness, and to whom their existence is a perpetual
shock. Her main idea in marrying the late Sir Thomas Kynnersley was to
associate herself with his political and philanthropic schemes. She is
the born committee woman, to whom a home represents a place where one
sleeps and eats in order to maintain the strength required for the
performance of committee duties. Her children have always been outside
the sphere of her real interests, but, afflicted, as such women are,
with chronic inflammation of the conscience, she had devoted the most
scrupulous care to their upbringing. She formed herself into a society
for the protection of her own children, and managed them by means of a
committee, which consisted of herself, and of which she was the honorary
secretary. She drew up articles of association and regulations. If Dale
contracted measles, she applied by-law 17. If Janet slapped
Dorothy, by-law 32 was brought into play. When Dale clamoured for
a rocking-horse, she found that the articles of association did not
provide for imaginative equitation. As the children grew up, the
committee had from time to time to revise the articles and submit them
to the general body for approval. There were many meetings before the
new sections relating to a University career for the boy and the coming
out for the girls were satisfactorily drafted. Once given the effect
of law, however, there was no appeal against these provisions. Both
committee and general body were powerless. Dale certainly owed his
methodical habits to his mechanical training, but whence he derived and
how he maintained his exuberance and spontaneity has often puzzled
me. He himself accounts for it on the score of heredity, in that an
ancestress of his married a highwayman who was hanged at Tyburn under
William and Mary.

In person Lady Kynnersley is lean and blanched and grey-haired. She
wears gold spectacles, which stand out oddly against the thin whiteness
of her face; she is still a handsome, distinguished woman, who can have,
when she chooses, a most gracious manner. As I, worldling and jester
though I am, for some mysterious reason have found favour in the lady's
eyes, she manifests this graciousness whenever we foregather. Ergo,
I like Lady Kynnersley, and would put myself to much inconvenience in
order to do her a service.

She kept me waiting in the drawing-room but a minute before she made
her appearance, grasped my hand, proclaimed my goodness in responding
so soon to her call, bade me sit down on the sofa by her side, inquired
after my health, and, the gods of politeness being propitiated, plunged
at once into the midst of matters.

Dale was going downhill headlong to Gadarene catastrophe. He had no
eyes or ears or thoughts for any one in the world but for a certain Lola
Brandt, a brazen creature from a circus, the shape of whose limbs was
the common knowledge of mankind from Dublin to Yokohama, and whose path
by sea and land, from Yokohama to Dublin, was strewn with the bodies of
her victims. With this man-eating tigress, declared Lady Kynnersley,
was Dale infatuated. He scorched himself morning, noon, and night in her
devastating presence. Had cut himself adrift from home, from society.
Had left trailing about on his study table a jeweller's bill for a
diamond bracelet. Was committing follies that made my brain reel to
hear. Had threatened, if worried much longer, to marry the Scarlet One
incontinently. Heaven knew, cried Lady Kynnersley, how many husbands
she had already--scattered along the track between Dublin and Yokohama.
There was no doubt about it. Dale was hurtling down to everlasting
bonfire. She looked to me to hold out the restraining hand.

“You have already spoken to Dale on the subject?” I asked, mindful of
the inharmonious socks and tie.

“I can talk to him of nothing else,” said Lady Kynnersley desperately.

“That's a pity,” said I. “You should talk to him of Heaven, or pigs, or
Babylonic cuneiform--anything but Lola Brandt. You ought to go to work
on a different system.”

“But I haven't a system at all,” cried the poor lady. “How was I to
foresee that my only son was going to fall in love with a circus rider?
These are contingencies in life for which one, with all the thought in
the world, can make no provision. I had arranged, as you know, that
he should marry Maisie Ellerton, as charming a girl as ever there was.
Isn't she? And an independent fortune besides.”

“A rosebud wrapped in a gold leaf,” I murmured.

“Now he's breaking the child's heart----”

“There was never any engagement between them, I am sure of that,” I
remarked.

“There wasn't. But I gave her to understand it was a settled
affair--merely a question of Dale speaking. And, instead of speaking,
he will have nothing to do with her, and spends all his time--and,
I suppose, though I don't like to refer to it, all his money--in the
society of this unmentionable woman.”

“Is she really so--so red as she is painted?” I asked.

“She isn't painted at all. That's where her artful and deceitful devilry
comes in----”

“I suppose Dale,” said I, “declares her to be an angel of light and
purity?”

“An angel on horseback! Whoever heard of such a thing?”

“It's the name of a rather fiery savoury,” said I.

“In a circus!” she continued.

“Well,” said I, “the ring of a circus is not essentially one of the
circles in Dante's Inferno.”

“Of course, my dear Simon,” she said, with some impatience, “if you
defend him--”

I hastened to interrupt her. “I don't. I think he is an egregious young
idiot; but before taking action it's well to get a clear idea of the
facts. By the way, how do you know she's not painted?”

“I've seen her--seen her with my own eyes in Dale's company--at the
Savoy. He's there supping with her every night. General Lamont told
me. I wouldn't believe it--Dale flaunting about in public with her.
The General offered to take me there after the inaugural meeting of
the International Aid Society at Grosvenor House. I went, and saw them
together. I shall never forget the look in the boy's eyes till my dying
day. She has got him body and soul. One reads of such things in the
poets, one sees it in pictures; but I've never come across it in real
life--never, never. It's dreadful, horrible, revolting. To think that a
son of mine, brought up from babyhood to calculate all his actions
with mathematical precision, should be guilty of this profligacy! It's
driving me mad, Simon; it really is. I don't know what to do. I've come
to the end of my resources. It's your turn now. The boy worships you.”

A wild appeal burned in her eyes and was refracted oddly through her
near-sighted spectacles. I had never seen her betray emotion before
during all the years of our friendship. The look and the tone of her
voice moved me. I expressed my sympathy and my readiness to do anything
in my power to snatch the infatuated boy from the claw and fang of the
syren and hale him to the forgiving feet of Maisie Ellerton. Indeed,
such a chivalrous adventure had vaguely passed through my mind during my
exalted mood at Murglebed-on-Sea. But then I knew little beyond the fact
that Dale was fluttering round an undesirable candle. Till now I had no
idea of the extent to which his wings were singed.

“Hasn't Dale spoken to you about this creature?” his mother asked.

“Young men of good taste keep these things from their elders, my dear
Lady Kynnersley,” said I.

“But you knew of it?”

“In a dim sort of way.”

“Oh, Simon--”

“The baby boys of Dale's set regard taking out the chorus to supper as
a solemn religious rite. They wouldn't think themselves respectable if
they didn't. I've done it myself--in moderation--when I was very young.”

“Men are mysteries,” sighed Lady Kynnersley.

“Please regard them as such,” said I, with a laugh, “and let Dale alone.
Allow him to do whatever irrational thing he likes, save bringing the
lady here to tea. If you try to tear him away from her he'll only cling
to her the closer. If you trumpet abroad her infamy he'll proclaim her a
slandered and martyred saint. Leave him to me for the present.”

“I'll do so gladly,” said Lady Kynnersley, with surprising meekness.
“But you _will_ bring him back, Simon? I've arranged for him to marry
Maisie. I can't have my plans for the future upset.”

By-law 379! Dear, excellent, but wooden-headed woman!

“I have your promise, haven't I?” she said, her hand in mine.

“You have,” said I nobly.

But how in the name of Astaroth I'm going to keep it I haven't the
remotest conception.



CHAPTER III

Some letters in Dale's round handwriting lay on the library table
awaiting my signature. Dale himself had gone. A lady had called for him,
said Rogers, in an electric brougham. As my chambers are on the second
floor and the staircase half-way down the arcade, Rogers's detailed
information surprised me. I asked him how he knew.

“A chauffeur in livery, sir, came to the door and said that the brougham
was waiting for Mr. Kynnersley.”

“I don't see how the lady came in,” I remarked.

“She didn't, sir. She remained in the brougham,” said Rogers.

So Lola Brandt keeps an electric brougham.

I lunched at the club, and turned up the article “Lola Brandt” in the
living encyclopaedia--that was my friend Renniker. The wonderful man
gave me her history from the cradle to Cadogan Gardens, where she now
resides. I must say that his details were rather vague. She rode in a
circus or had a talking horse--he was not quite sure; and concerning
her conjugal or extra-conjugal heart affairs he admitted that his
information was either unauthenticated or conjectural. At any rate, she
had not a shred of reputation. And she didn't want it, said Renniker; it
would be as much use to her as a diving suit.

“She has young Dale Kynnersley in tow,” he remarked.

“So I gather,” said I. “And now can you tell me something else? What is
the present state of political parties in Guatemala?”

I was not in the least interested in Guatemala; but I did not care to
discuss Dale with Renniker. When he had completed his sketch of affairs
in that obscure republic, I thanked him politely and ordered coffee.

Feeling in a gregarious, companionable humour--I have had enough
solitude at Murglebed to last me the rest of my short lifetime--I went
later in the afternoon to Sussex Gardens to call on Mrs. Ellerton. It
was her day at home, and the drawing-room was filled with chattering
people. I stayed until most of them were gone, and then Maisie dragged
me to the inner room, where a table was strewn with the wreckage of tea.

“I haven't had any,” she said, grasping the teapot and pouring a treacly
liquid into a cup. “You must have some more. Do you like it black, or
with milk?”

She is a dainty slip of a girl, with deep grey eyes and wavy brown hair
and a sea-shell complexion. I absently swallowed the abomination she
handed me, for I was looking at her over the teacup and wondering how
an exquisite-minded gentleman like Dale could forsake her for a Lola
Brandt. It was not as if Maisie were an empty-headed, empty-natured
little girl. She is a young person of sense, education, and character.
She also adores musical comedy and a band at dinner: an excellent thing
in woman--when she is very young.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked.

“Because, my dear Maisie,” said I, “you are good to look upon. You are
also dropping a hairpin.”

She hastily secured the dangling thing. “I did my hair anyhow to-day,”
 she explained.

Again I thought of Dale's tie and socks. The signs of a lover's
“careless desolation,” described by Rosalind so minutely, can still be
detected in modern youth of both sexes. I did not pursue the question,
but alluded to autumn gaieties. She spoke of them without enthusiasm.
Miss Somebody's wedding was very dull, and Mrs. Somebody Else's dance
manned with vile and vacuous dancers. At the Opera the greatest of
German sopranos sang false. All human institutions had taken a crooked
turn, and her cat could not be persuaded to pay the commonest attention
to its kittens. Then she asked me nonchalantly:

“Have you seen anything of Dale lately?”

“He was working with me this morning. I've been away, you know.”

“I forgot.”

“When did you last see him?” I asked.

“Oh, ages ago! He has not been near us for weeks. We used to be such
friends. I don't think it's very polite of him, do you?”

“I'll order him to call forthwith,” said I.

“Oh, please don't! If he won't come of his own accord--I don't want to
see him particularly.”

She tossed her shapely head and looked at me bravely.

“You are quite right,” said I. “Dale's a selfish, ill-mannered young
cub.”

“He isn't!” she flashed. “How dare you say such things about him!”

I smiled and took both her hands--one of them held a piece of brown
bread-and-butter.

“My dear,” said I, “model yourself on Little Bo-Peep. I don't know who
gave her the famous bit of advice, but I think it was I myself in a
pastoral incarnation. I had a woolly cloak and a crook, and she was like
a Dresden china figure--the image of you.”

Her eyes swam, but she laughed and said I was good to her. I said:

“The man who wouldn't be good to you is an unhung villain.”

Then her mother joined us, and our little confidential talk came to an
end. It was enough, however, to convince me that my poor little Ariadne
was shedding many desperate tears in secret over her desertion.

On my way home I looked in on my doctor. His name is Hunnington. He
grasped me by the hand and eagerly inquired whether my pain was worse. I
said it was not. He professed delight, but looked disappointed. I ought
to have replied in the affirmative. It is so easy to make others happy.

I dined, read a novel, and went to sleep in the cheerful frame of mind
induced by the consciousness of having made some little progress on the
path of eumoiriety.

The next morning Dale made his customary appearance. He wore a morning
coat, a dark tie, and patent-leather boots.

“Well,” said I, “have you dressed more carefully today?”

He looked himself anxiously over and inquired whether there was anything
wrong. I assured him of the impeccability of his attire, and commented
on its splendour.

“Are you going to take Maisie out to lunch?”

He started and reddened beneath his dark skin. Before he could speak I
laid my hand on his shoulder.

“I'm an old friend, Dale. You mustn't be angry with me. But don't you
think you're treating Maisie rather badly?”

“You've no right to say so,” he burst out hotly. “No one has the right
to say so. There was never a question of an engagement between Maisie
and myself.”

“Then there ought to have been,” I said judicially. “No decent man plays
fast and loose with a girl and throws her over just at the moment when
he ought to be asking her to marry him.”

“I suppose my mother's been at you. That's what she wanted to see you
about yesterday. I wish to God she would mind her own business.”

“And that I would mind mine?”

Dale did not reply. For some odd reason he is devotedly attached to me,
and respects my opinion on worldly matters. He walked to the window and
looked out. Presently, without turning round, he said:

“I suppose she has been rubbing it in about Lola Brandt?”

“She did mention the lady's name,” said I. “So did Renniker at the club.
I suppose every one you know and many you don't are mentioning it.”

“Well, what if they are?”

“They're creating an atmosphere about your name which is scarcely that
in which to make an entrance into public life.”

Still with his back turned, he morosely informed me in his vernacular
that he contemplated public life with feelings of indifference, and was
perfectly prepared to abandon his ambitions. I took up my parable, the
same old parable that wise seniors have preached to the deluded young
from time immemorial. I have seldom held forth so platitudinously even
in the House of Commons. I spoke as impressively as a bishop. In the
midst of my harangue he came and sat by the library table and rested
his chin on his palm, looking at me quietly out of his dark eyes. His
mildness encouraged me to further efforts. I instanced cases of other
young men of the world who had gone the way of the flesh and had ended
at the devil.

There was Paget, of the Guards, eaten to the bone by the Syren--not even
the gold lace on his uniform left. There was Merridew, once the hope
of the party, now living in ignoble obscurity with an old and painted
mistress, whom he detested, but to whom habit and sapped will-power kept
him in thrall. There was Bullen, who blew his brains out. In a generous
glow I waxed prophetic and drew a vivid picture of Dale's moral, mental,
physical, financial, and social ruin, and finished up in a masterly
peroration.

Then, without moving, he calmly said:

“My dear Simon, you are talking through your hat!”

He had allowed me to walk backwards and forwards on the hearthrug before
a blazing fire, pouring out the wealth of my wisdom, experience, and
rhetoric for ten minutes by the clock, and then coolly informed me that
I was talking through my hat.

I wiped my forehead, sat down, and looked at him across the table in
surprise and indignation.

“If you can point out one irrelevant or absurd remark in my homily, I'll
eat the hat through which you say I'm talking.”

“The whole thing is rot from beginning to end!” said he. “None of you
good people know anything at all about Lola Brandt. She's not the
sort of woman you think. She's quite different. You can't judge her by
ordinary standards. There's not a woman like her in the wide world!”

I made a gesture of discouragement. The same old parable of the wise
had evoked the same old retort from the deluded young. She was quite
different from other women. She was misunderstood by the cynical and
gross-minded world. A heart of virgin purity beat beneath her mercenary
bosom. Her lurid past had been the reiterated martyrdom of a noble
nature. O Golden Age! O unutterable silliness of Boyhood!

“For Heaven's sake, don't talk in that way!” he cried (I had been
talking in that way), and he rose and walked like a young tiger about
the room. “I can't stand it. I've gone mad about her. She has got into
my blood somehow. I think about her all day long, and I can't sleep at
night. I would give up any mortal thing on earth for her. She is the one
woman in the world for me! She's the dearest, sweetest, tenderest, most
beautiful creature God ever made!”

“And you honour and respect her--just as you would honour and respect
Maisie?” I asked quietly.

“Of course I do!” he flashed. “Don't I tell you that you know nothing
whatever about her? She is the dearest, sweetest----” etc., etc. And he
continued to trumpet forth the Olympian qualities of the Syren and his
own fervent adoration. I was the only being to whom he had opened his
heart, and, the floodgates being set free, the torrent burst forth in
this tempestuous and incoherent manner. I let him go on, for I thought
it did him good; but his rhapsody added very little to my information.

The lady who had “houp-la'd” her way from Dublin to Yokohama was the
spotless queen of beauty, and Dale was frenziedly, idiotically in love
with her. That was all I could gather. When he had finished, which he
did somewhat abruptly, he threw himself into a chair and took out his
cigarette-case with shaky fingers.

“There. I suppose I've made a damn-fool exhibition of myself,” he said,
defiantly. “What have you got to say about it?”

“Precisely,” I replied, “what I said before. I'll repeat it, if you
like.”

Indeed, what more was there to say for the present about the lunatic
business? I had come to the end of my arguments.

He reflected for a moment, then rose and came over to the fireplace.

“Look here, Simon, you must let me go my own way in this. In matters of
politics and worldly wisdom and social affairs and honourable dealing
and all that sort of thing I would follow you blindly. You're my chief,
and a kind of elder brother as well. I would do any mortal thing for
you. You know that. But you've no right to try to guide me in this
matter. You know no more about it than my mother. You've had no
experience. You've never let yourself go about a woman in your life.
Lord of Heaven, man, you have never begun to know what it means!”

Oh, dear me! Here was the situation as old as the return of the Prodigal
or the desertion of the trusting village maiden, or any other cliche in
the melodrama of real life. “You are making a fool of yourself,” says
Mentor. “Ah,” shrieks Telemachus, “but you never loved! You don't know
what love is.”

I looked at him whimsically.

“Don't I?”

My thoughts sped back down the years to a garden in France. Her name was
Clothilde. We met in a manner outrageous to Gallic propriety, as I used
to climb over the garden wall to the peril of my epidermis. We loved. We
were parted by stern parents--not mine--and Clothilde was packed off to
the good Sisters who had previously had care of her education. Now she
is fat and happy, and the wife of a banker and the mother of children.

But the romance was sad and bad and mad enough while it lasted; and when
Clothilde was (figuratively) dragged from my arms I cursed and swore and
out-Heroded Herod, played Termagant, and summoned the heavens to fall
down and crush me miserable beneath their weight. And then her brother
challenged me to fight a duel, whereupon, as the most worshipped of all
She's had not received a ha'porth of harm at my hands, I called him a
silly ass and threatened to break his head if he interfered any more
in my legitimate despair. I smile at it now; but it was real at
two-and-twenty--as real, I take it, as Dale's consuming passion for the
lady of the circus.

There was also, I remembered, a certain ---- But this had nothing to do
with Dale. Neither had the tragedy of my lost Clothilde. The memories,
however, brought a wistful touch of sympathy into my voice.

“You soberly think, my dear old Dale,” said I, “that I know nothing of
love and passion and the rest of the divine madness?”

“I'm sure you don't,” he cried, with an impatient gesture. “If you did,
you wouldn't--”

He came to an abrupt and confused halt.

“I wouldn't--what?”

“Nothing. I forgot what I was going to say. Let us talk of something
else.”

“It was on the tip of your impulsive tongue,” said I cheerfully, “to
refer to my attitude towards Miss Faversham.”

“I'm desperately sorry,” said he, reddening. “It was unpardonable. But
how did you guess?”

I laughed and quoted the Latin tag about the ingenuous boy of the
ingenuous visage and ingenuous modesty.

“Because I don't feverishly search the postbag for a letter from Miss
Faversham you conclude I'm a bloodless automaton?”

“Please don't say any more about it, Simon,” he pleaded in deep
distress.

A sudden idea struck me. I reflected, walked to the window, and, having
made up my mind, sat down again. I had a weapon to hand which I had
overlooked, and with the discovery came a weak craving for the boy's
sympathy. I believe I care more for him than for any living creature. I
decided to give him some notion of my position.

Sooner or later he would have to learn it.

“I would rather like to tell you something,” said I, “about my
engagement--in confidence, of course. When Eleanor Faversham comes back
I propose to ask her to release me from it.”

He drew a long breath. “I'm glad. She's an awfully nice girl, but
she's no more in love with you than my mother is. But it'll be rather
difficult, won't it?”

“I don't think so,” I replied, shaking my head. “It's a question of
health. My doctors absolutely forbid it.”

A look of affectionate alarm sprang into his eyes. He broke into
sympathy. My health? Why had I not told him before? In Heaven's name,
what was the matter with me?

“Something silly,” said I. “Nothing you need worry about on my account.
Only I must go _piano_ for the rest of my days. Marriage isn't to be
thought of. There is something else I must tell you. I must resign my
seat.”

“Resign your seat? Give up Parliament? When?”

“As soon as possible.”

He looked at me aghast, as if the world were coming to an end.

“We had better concoct an epistle to Raggles this morning.”

“But you can't be serious?”

“I can sometimes, my dear Dale. This is one of the afflicting
occasions.”

“You out of Parliament? You out of public life? It's inconceivable. It's
damnable. But you're just coming into your own--what Raggles said, what
I told you yesterday. But it can't be. You can hold on. I'll do all the
drudgery for you. I'll work night and day.”

And he tramped up and down the room, uttering the disconnected phrases
which an honest young soul unaccustomed to express itself emotionally
blurts out in moments of deep feeling.

“It's no use, Dale,” said I, “I've got my marching orders.”

“But why should they come just now?”

“When the sweets of office are dangling at my lips? It's pretty simple.”
 I laughed. “It's one of the little ironies that please the high gods
so immensely. They have an elementary sense of humour--like that of
the funny fellow who pulls your chair from under you and shrieks with
laughter when you go wallop on to the floor. Well, I don't grudge them
their amusement. They must have a dull time settling mundane affairs,
and a little joke goes a long way with them, as it does in the House
of Commons. Fancy sitting on those green benches legislating for all
eternity, with never a recess and never even a dinner hour! Poor high
gods! Let us pity them.”

I looked at him and smiled, perhaps a little wearily. One can always
command one's eyes, but one's lips sometimes get out of control. He
could not have noticed my lips, however, for he cried:

“By George, you're splendid! I wish I could take a knock-out blow like
that!”

“You'll have to one of these days. It's the only way of taking it. And
now,” said I, in a businesslike tone, “I've told you all this with a
purpose. At Wymington it will be a case of 'Le Roi est mort. Vive le
Roi!' The vacancy will have to be filled up at once. We'll have to find
a suitable candidate. Have you one in your mind?”

“Not a soul.”

“I have.”

“Who?”

“You.”

“Me?” He nearly sprang into the air with astonishment.

“Why not?”

“They'd never adopt me.”

“I think they would,” I said. “There are men in the House as young as
you. You're well known at Wymington and at headquarters as my right-hand
man. You've done some speaking--you do it rather well; it's only
your private conversational style that's atrocious. You've got a name
familiar in public life up and down the country, thanks to your father
and mother. It's a fairly safe seat. I see no reason why they shouldn't
adopt you. Would you like it?”

“Like it?” he cried. “Why I'd give my ears for it.”

“Then,” said I, playing my winning card, “let us hear no more about Lola
Brandt.”

He gave me a swift glance, and walked up and down the room for a while
in silence. Presently he halted in front of me.

“Look here, Simon, you're a beast, but”--he smiled frankly at the
quotation--“you're a just beast. You oughtn't to rub it in like that
about Lola until you have seen her yourself. It isn't fair.”

“You speak now in language distinctly approaching that of reason,” I
remarked. “What do you want me to do?”

“Come with me this afternoon and see her.”

My young friend had me nicely in the trap. I could not refuse.

“Very well,” said I. “But on the distinct understanding--”

“Oh, on any old understanding you like!” he cried, and darted to the
door.

“Where are you going?”

“To ring her up on the telephone and tell her you're coming.”

That's the worst of the young. They have such a disconcerting manner of
clinching one's undertakings.



CHAPTER IV

My first impression of Lola Brandt in the dimness of the room was that
of a lithe panther in petticoats rising lazily from the depths of an
easy chair. A sinuous action of the arm, as she extended her hand to
welcome me, was accompanied by a curiously flexible turn of the body.
Her hand as it enveloped, rather than grasped, mine seemed boneless but
exceedingly powerful. An indoor dress of brown and gold striped Indian
silk clung to her figure, which, largely built, had an appearance of
great strength. Dark bronze hair and dark eyes, that in the soft light
of the room glowed with deep gold reflections, completed the pantherine
suggestion. She seemed to be on the verge of thirty. A most dangerous
woman, I decided--one to be shut up in a cage with thick iron bars.

“It's charming of you to come. I've heard so much of you from Mr.
Kynnersley. Do sit down.”

Her voice was lazy and languorous and caressing like the purr of a great
cat; and there was something exotic in her accent, something seductive,
something that ought to be prohibited by the police. She sank into her
low chair by the fire, indicating one for me square with the hearthrug.
Dale, so as to leave me a fair conversational field with the lady,
established himself on the sofa some distance off, and began to talk
with a Chow dog, with whom he was obviously on terms of familiarity.
Madame Brandt make a remark about the Chow dog's virtues, to which I
politely replied. She put him through several tricks. I admired his
talent. She declared her affections to be divided between Adolphus (that
was the Chow dog's name) and an ouistiti, who was confined to bed for
the present owing to the evil qualities of the November air. For the
first time I blessed the English climate. I hate little monkeys. I also
felt a queer disappointment. A woman like that ought to have caught an
ourang-outang.

She guessed my thought in an uncanny manner, and smiled, showing strong,
white, even teeth--the most marvellous teeth I have ever beheld--so even
as to constitute almost a deformity.

“I'm fonder of bigger animals,” she said. “I was born among them.
My father was a lion tamer, so I know all the ways of beasts. I love
bears--I once trained one to drive a cart--but”--with a sigh--“you can't
keep bears in Cadogan Gardens.”

“You may get hold of a human one now and then,” said Dale.

“I've no doubt Madame Brandt could train him to dance to whatever tune
she played,” said I.

She turned her dark golden eyes lazily, slumberously on me.

“Why do you say that, Mr. de Gex?”

This was disconcerting. Why had I said it? For no particular reason,
save to keep up a commonplace conversation in which I took no absorbing
interest. It was a direct challenge. Young Dale stopped playing with the
Chow dog and grinned. It behooved me to say something. I said it with a
bow and a wave of my hand:

“Because, though your father was a lion-tamer, your mother was a woman.”

She appeared to reflect for a moment; then addressing Dale:

“The answer doesn't amount to a ha'porth of cats'-meat, but you couldn't
have got out of it like that.”

I was again disconcerted, but I remarked that he would learn in time
when my mentorship was over and I handed him, a finished product, to
society.

“How long will that be?” she asked.

“I don't know. Are you anxious for his immediate perfecting?”

Her shoulders gave what in ordinary women would have been a shrug: with
her it was a slow ripple. I vow if her neck had been bare one could have
seen it undulate beneath the skin.

“What is perfection?”

“Can you ask?” laughed Dale. “Behold!” And he pointed to me.

“That's cheap,” said the lady. “I've heard Auguste say cleverer things.”

“Who's Auguste?” asked Dale.

“Auguste,” said I, “is the generic name of the clown in the French
Hippodrome.”

“Oh, the Circus!” cried Dale.

“I'll be glad if you'll teach him to call it the Hippodrome, Mr. de
Gex,” she remarked, with another of her slumberous glances.

“That will be one step nearer perfection,” said I.

The short November twilight had deepened into darkness; the fire, which
was blazing when we entered, had settled into a glow, and the room was
lit by one shaded lamp. To me the dimness was restful, but Dale, who,
with the crude instincts of youth, loves glare, began to fidget, and
presently asked whether he might turn on the electric light. Permission
was given. My hostess invited me to smoke and, to hand her a box of
cigarettes which lay on the mantelpiece, I rose, bent over her while
she lit her cigarette from my match, and resuming an upright position,
became rooted to the hearthrug.

With the flood of illumination, disclosing everything that hitherto had
been wrapped in shadow and mystery, came a shock.

It was a most extraordinary, perplexing room. The cheap and the costly,
the rare and the common, the exquisite and the tawdry jostled one
another on walls and floor. At one end of the Louis XVI sofa on which
Dale had been sitting lay a boating cushion covered with a Union Jack,
at the other a cushion covered with old Moorish embroidery. The chair
I had vacated I discovered to be of old Spanish oak and stamped Cordova
leather bearing traces of a coat-of-arms in gold. My hostess lounged in
a low characterless seat amid a mass of heterogeneous cushions. There
were many flowers in the room--some in Cloisonne vases, others in
gimcrack vessels such as are bought at country fairs. On the mantelpiece
and on tables were mingled precious ivories from Japan, trumpery chalets
from the Tyrol, choice bits of Sevres and Venetian glass, bottles with
ladders and little men inside them, vulgar china fowls sitting on eggs,
and a thousand restless little objects screeching in dumb agony at one
another.

The more one looked the more confounded became confusion. Lengths of
beautifully embroidered Chinese silk formed curtains for the doors and
windows; but they were tied back with cords ending in horrible little
plush monkeys in lieu of tassels. A Second Empire gilt mirror hung over
the Louis XVI sofa, and was flanked on the one side by a villainous
German print of “The Huntsman's Return” and on the other by a dainty
water-colour. Myriads of photographs, some in frames, met the eye
everywhere--on the grand piano, on the occasional tables, on the
mantelpiece, stuck obliquely all round the Queen Anne mirror above it,
on the walls. Many of them represented animals--bears and lions and
pawing horses. Dale's photograph I noticed in a silver frame on the
piano. There was not a book in the place. But in the corner of the room
by a further window gleamed a large marble Venus of Milo, charmingly
executed, who stood regarding the welter with eyes calm and unconcerned.

I was aroused from the momentary shock caused by the revelation of
this eccentric apartment by an unknown nauseous flavour in my mouth.
I realised it was the cigarette to which I had helped myself from the
beautifully chased silver casket I had taken from the mantelpiece. I
eyed the thing and concluded it was made of the very cheapest tobacco,
and was what the street urchin calls a “fag.” I learned afterwards that
I was right. She purchased them at the rate of six for a penny, and
smoked them in enormous quantities. For politeness' sake I continued
to puff at the unclean thing until I nearly made myself sick. Then,
simulating absentmindedness, I threw it into the fire.

Why, in the sacred name of Nicotine, does a luxurious lady like Lola
Brandt smoke such unutterable garbage?

On the other hand, the tea which she offered us a few minutes later, and
begged us to drink without milk, was the most exquisite I have tasted
outside Russia. She informed us that she got it direct from Moscow.

“I can't stand your black Ceylon tea,” she remarked, with a grimace.

And yet she could smoke “fags.” I wondered what other contradictious
tastes she possessed. No doubt she could eat blood puddings with relish
and had a discriminating palate for claret. Truly, a perplexing lady.

“You must find leisure in London a great change after your adventurous
career,” said I, by way of polite conversation.

“I just love it. I'm as lazy as a cat,” she said, settling with her
pantherine grace among the cushions. “Do you know what has been my
ambition ever since I was a kid?”

“Whatever of woman's ambitions you had you must have attained,” said I,
with a bow.

“Pooh!” she said. “You mean that I can have crowds of men falling
in love with me. That's rubbish.” She was certainly frank. “I meant
something quite different. I wonder whether you can understand. The
world used to seem to me divided into two classes that never met--we
performing people and the public, the thousand white faces that looked
at us and went away and talked to other white faces and forgot all about
performing animals till they came next time. Now I've got what I wanted.
See? I'm one of the public.”

“And you love Philistia better than Bohemia?” I asked.

She knitted her brows and looked at me puzzled.

“If you want to talk to me,” she said, “you must talk straight. I've had
no more education than a tinker's dog.”

She made this peculiar announcement, not defiantly, not rudely, but
appealingly, graciously. It was not a rebuke for priggishness; it was
the unpresentable statement of a fact. I apologized for a lunatic habit
of speech and paraphrased my question.

“In a word,” cried Dale, coming in on my heels with an elucidation of my
periphrasis, “what de Gex is driving at is--Do you prefer respectability
to ramping round?”

She turned slowly to him. “My dear boy, when do you think I was not
respectable?”

He jumped from the sofa as if the Chow dog had bitten him.

“Good Heavens, I never meant you to take it that way!”

She laughed, stretched up a lazy arm to him, and looked at him somewhat
quizzically in the face as he kissed her finger-tips. Although I could
have boxed the silly fellow's ears, I vow he did it in a very pretty
fashion. The young man of the day, as a general rule, has no more notion
how to kiss a woman's hand than how to take snuff or dance a pavane.
Indeed, lots of them don't know how to kiss a girl at all.

“My dear,” she said. “I was much more respectable sitting on the stage
at tea with my horse, Sultan, than supping with you at the Savoy. You
don't know the deadly respectability of most people in the profession,
and the worst of it is that while we're being utterly dull and dowdy,
the public think we're having a devil of a time. So we don't even get
the credit of our virtues. I prefer the Savoy--and this.” She turned to
me. “It is nice having decent people to tea. Do you know what I should
love? I should love to have an At Home day--and receive ladies, real
ladies. And I have such a sweet place, haven't I?”

“You have many beautiful things around you,” said I truthfully.

She sighed. “I should like more people to see them.”

“In fact,” said I, “you have social ambitions, Madame Brandt?”

She looked at me for a moment out of the corner of her eye.

“Are you skinning me?” she asked.

Where she had picked up this eccentric metaphor I know not. She had many
odd turns of language as yet not current among the fashionable classes.
I gravely assured her that I was not sarcastic. I commended her
praiseworthy aspirations.

“But,” said I innocently, “don't you miss the hard training, the
physical exercise, the delight of motion, the excitement, the----?”--my
vocabulary failing me, I sketched with a gesture the equestrienne's
classical encouragement to her steed.

She looked at me uncomprehendingly.

“The what?” she asked.

“What are you playing at?” inquired Dale.

“I was referring to the ring,” said I.

They both burst out laughing, to my discomfiture.

“What do you take me for? A circus rider? Performing in a tent and
living in a caravan? You think I jump through a hoop in tights?”

“All I can say,” I murmured, by way of apology, “is that it's a
mendacious world. I'm deeply sorry.”

Why had I been misled in this shameful manner?

Madame Brandt with lazy good nature accepted my excuses.

“I'm what is professionally known as a _dompteuse_,” she explained. “Of
course, when I was a kid I was trained as an acrobat, for my father was
poor; but when he grew rich and the owner of animals, which he did when
I was fourteen, I joined him and worked with him all over the world
until I went on my own. Do you mean to say you never heard of me?”

“Madame Brandt,” said I, “the last thing to be astonished at is human
ignorance. Do you know that 30 per cent of the French army at the
present day have never heard of the Franco-Prussian War?”

“My dear Simon,” cried Dale, “the two things don't hang together. The
Franco-Prussian War is not advertised all over France like Beecham's
Pills, whereas six years ago you couldn't move two steps in London
without seeing posters of Lola Brandt and her horse Sultan.”

“Ah, the horse!” said I. “That's how the wicked circus story got about.”

“It was the last act I ever did,” said Madame Brandt. “I taught
Sultan--oh, he was a dear, beautiful thing--to count and add up and
guess articles taken from the audience. I was at the Hippodrome. Then
at the Nouveau Cirque at Paris; I was at St. Petersburg, Vienna,
Berlin--all over Europe with Sultan.”

“And where is Sultan now?” I asked.

“He is dead. Somebody poisoned him,” she replied, looking into the fire.
After a pause she continued in a low voice, singularly like the growl of
a wrathful animal, “If ever I meet that man alive it will go hard with
him.”

At that moment the door opened and the servant announced:

“Professor Anastasius Papadopoulos!”

Whereupon the shortest creature that ever bore so lengthy a name, a
dwarf not more than four feet high, wearing a frock coat and bright
yellow gloves, entered the room, and crossing it at a sort of trot fell
on his knees by the side of Madame Brandt's chair.

_“Ah! Carissima, je vous vois enfin, Ach liebes Herz! Que j'ai envie de
pleurer!”_

Madame Brandt smiled, took the creature's head between her hands and
kissed his forehead. She also caressed his shoulders.

“My dear Anastasius, how good it is to see you. Where have you been this
long time? Why didn't you write and let me know you were in England?
But, see, Anastasius, I have visitors. Let me introduce you.”

She spoke in French fluently, but with a frank British accent, which
grated on a fastidious ear. The dwarf rose, made two solemn bows, and
declared himself enchanted. Although his head was too large for
his body, he was neither ill-made nor repulsive. He looked about
thirty-five. A high forehead, dark, mournful eyes, and a black moustache
and imperial gave him an odd resemblance to Napoleon the Third.

“I arrived from New York this morning, with my cats. Oh, a mad success.
I have one called Phoebus, because he drives a chariot drawn by six
rats. Phoebus Apollo was the god of the sun. I must show him to you,
Madonna. You would love him as I love you. And I also have an angora,
my beautiful Santa Bianca. And you, gentlemen”--he turned to Dale and
myself and addressed us in his peculiar jargon of French, German,
and Italian--“you must come and see my cats if I can get a London
engagement. At present I must rest. The artist needs repose sometimes.
I will sun myself in the smiles of our dear lady here, and my pupil and
assistant, Quast, can look after my cats. Meanwhile the brain of the
artist,” he tapped his brow, “needs to lie fallow so that he can invent
fresh and daring combinations. Do such things interest you, messieurs?”

“Vastly,” said I.

He pulled out of his breast pocket an enormous gilt-bound pocket-book,
bearing a gilt monogram of such size that it looked like a cartouche
on an architectural panel, and selected therefrom three cards which he
gravely distributed among us. They bore the legend:


PROFESSOR ANASTASIUS PAPADOPOULOS

GOLD AND SILVER MEDALLIST

THE CAT KING

LE ROI DES CHATS

DER KATZEN KONIG

London Agents: MESSRS. CONTO & BLAG,

172 Maiden Lane, W.C.


“There,” said he, “I am always to be found, should you ever require my
services. I have a masterpiece in my head. I come on to the scene like
Bacchus drawn by my two cats. How are the cats to draw my heavy weight?
I'll have a noiseless clockwork arrangement that will really propel the
car. You must come and see it.”

“Delighted, I'm sure,” said Dale, who stood looking down on the
Liliputian egotist with polite wonder. Lola Brandt glanced at him
apologetically.

“You mustn't mind him, Dale. He has only two ideas in his head, his cats
and myself. He's devoted to me.”

“I don't think I shall be jealous,” said Dale in a low voice.

“Foolish boy!” she whispered.

During the love scene, which was conducted in English, a language which
Mr. Papadopoulos evidently did not understand, the dwarf scowled at Dale
and twirled his moustache fiercely. In order to attract Madame Brandt's
attention he fetched a packet of papers from his pocket and laid them
with a flourish on the tea-table.

“Here are the documents,” said he.

“What documents?”

“A full inquiry into the circumstances attending the death of Madame
Brandt's horse Sultan.”

“Have you found out anything, Anastasius?” she asked, in the indulgent
tone in which one addresses an eager child.

“Not exactly,” said he. “But I have a conviction that by this means the
murderer will be brought to justice. To this I have devoted my life--in
your service.”

He put his hand on the spot of his tightly buttoned frock-coat that
covered his heart, and bowed profoundly. It was obvious that he resented
our presence and desired to wipe us out of our hostess's consideration.
I glanced ironically at Dale's disgusted face, and smiled at the
imperfect development of his sense of humour. Indeed, to the young,
humour is only a weapon of offence. It takes a philosopher to use it as
defensive armour. Dale burned to outdo Mr. Papadopoulos. I, having
no such ambition, laid my hand on his arm and went forward to take my
leave.

“Madame Brandt,” said I, “old friends have doubtless much to talk
over. I thank you for the privilege you have afforded me of making your
acquaintance.”

She rose and accompanied us to the landing outside the flat door.
After saying good-bye to Dale, who went down with his boyish tread, she
detained me for a second or two, holding my hand, and again her clasp
enveloped it like some clinging sea-plant. She looked at me very
wistfully.

“The next time you come, Mr. de Gex, do come as a friend and not as an
enemy.”

I was startled. I thought I had conducted the interview with peculiar
suavity.

“An enemy, dear lady?”

“Yes. Can't I see it?” she said in her languorous, caressing voice. “And
I should love to have you for a friend. You could be such a good one. I
have so few.”

“I must argue this out with you another time,” said I diplomatically.

“That's a promise,” said Lola Brandt.

“What's a promise?” asked Dale, when I joined him in the hall.

“That I will do myself the pleasure of calling on Madame again.”

The porter whistled for a cab. A hansom drove up. As my destination was
the Albany, and as I knew Dale was going home to Eccleston Square, I
held out my hand.

“Good-bye, Dale. I'll see you to-morrow.”

“But aren't you going to tell me what you think of her?” he cried in
great dismay.

The pavement was muddy, the evening dark, and a gusty wind blew the
drizzle into our faces. It is only the preposterously young who expect
a man to rhapsodise over somebody else's inamorata at such a moment. I
turned up the fur collar of my coat.

“She is good-looking,” said I.

“Any idiot can see that!” he burst out impatiently. “I want to know what
opinion you formed of her.”

I reflected. If I could have labelled her as the Scarlet Woman, the
Martyred Saint, the Jolly Bohemian, or the Bold Adventuress, my task
would have been easy. But I had an uncomfortable feeling that Lola
Brandt was not to be classified in so simple a fashion. I took refuge in
a negative.

“She would hardly be a success,” said I, “in serious political circles.”

With that I made my escape.



CHAPTER V

I wish I had not called on Lola Brandt. She disturbs me to the point
of nightmare. In a fit of dream paralysis last night I fancied myself
stalked by a panther, which in the act of springing turned into Lola
Brandt. What she would have done I know not, for I awoke; but I have
a haunting sensation that she was about to devour me. Now, a woman who
would devour a sleeping Member of Parliament is not a fit consort for a
youth about to enter on a political career.

The woman worries me. I find myself speculating on her character while
I ought to be minding my affairs; and this I do on her own account,
without any reference to my undertaking to rescue Dale from her
clutches. Her obvious attributes are lazy good nature and swift
intuition, which are as contrary as her tastes in tobacco and tea; but
beyond the obvious lurks a mysterious animal power which repels and
attracts. Were not her expressions rather melancholy than sensuous,
rather benevolent than cruel, one might take her as a model for Queen
Berenice or the estimable lady monarchs who yielded themselves adorably
to a gentleman's kisses in the evening and saw to it that his head
was nicely chopped off in the morning. I can quite understand Dale's
infatuation. She may be as worthless as you please, but she is by no
means the vulgar syren I was led to expect. I wish she were. My task
would be easier. Why hasn't he fallen in love with one of the chorus
whom his congeners take out to supper? He is an aggravating fellow.

I have declined to discuss her merits or demerits with him. I could
scarcely do that with dignity, said I; a remark which seemed to impress
him with a sense of my honesty. I asked what were his intentions
regarding her. I discovered that they were still indefinite. In his
exalted moments he talked of marriage.

“But what has become of her husband?” I inquired, drawing a bow at a
venture.

“I suppose he's dead,” said Dale.

“But suppose he isn't?”

He informed me in his young magnificence that Lola and himself would be
above foolish moral conventions.

“Indeed?” said I.

“Don't pretend to be a Puritan,” said he.

“I don't pretend to like the idea, anyhow,” I remarked.

He shrugged his shoulders. It was not the time for a lecture on
morality.

“How do you know that the lady returns your passion?” I asked, watching
him narrowly.

He grew red. “Is that a fair question?”

“Yes,” said I. “You invited me to call on her and judge the affair for
myself. I'm doing it. How far have things gone up to now?”

He flashed round on me. Did I mean to insinuate that there was anything
wrong? There wasn't. How could I dream of such a thing? He was vastly
indignant.

“Well, my dear boy,” said I, “you've just this minute been scoffing at
foolish moral conventions. If you want to know my opinion,” I continued,
after a pause, “it is this--she doesn't care a scrap for you.”

Of course I was talking nonsense.

I did not condescend to argue. Neither did I dwell upon the fact that
her affection had not reached the point of informing him whether she
had a husband, and if so, whether he was alive or dead. This gives me an
idea. Suppose I can prove to him beyond a shadow of doubt that the lady,
although flattered by the devotion of a handsome young fellow of birth
and breeding, does not, as I remarked, care a scrap for him. Suppose I
exhibit her to him in the arms, figuratively speaking, of her husband
(providing one is lurking in some back-alley of the world), Mr.
Anastasius Papadopoulos, a curate, or a champion wrestler. He would do
desperate things for a month or two; but then he would wake up sane
one fine morning and seek out Maisie Ellerton in a salutary state of
penitence. I wish I knew a curate who combined a passion for bears and a
yearning for ladylike tea-parties. I would take him forthwith to Cadogan
Gardens. Lola Brandt and himself would have tastes in common and would
fall in love with each other on the spot.

Of course there is the other time-honoured plan which I have not yet
tried--to arm myself with diplomacy, call on Madame Brandt, and, working
on her feelings, persuade her in the name of the boy's mother and
sweetheart to make a noble sacrifice in the good, old-fashioned way. But
this seems such an unhumourous proceeding. If I am to achieve eumoiriety
I may as well do it with some distinction.



“Who doth Time gallop withal?” asks Orlando.

“With a thief to the gallows,” says Rosalind. It is true. The days
have an uncanny way of racing by. I see my little allotted span of life
shrinking visibly, like the _peau de chagrin_. I must bestir myself, or
my last day will come before I have accomplished anything.



When I jotted down the above not very original memorandum I had passed a
perfectly uneumoirous week among my friends and social acquaintances.
I had stood godfather to my sister Agatha's fifth child, taking upon
myself obligations which I shall never be able to perform; I had dined
amusingly at my sister Jane's; I had shot pheasants at Farfax
Glenn's place in Hampshire; and I had paid a long-promised charming
country-house visit to old Lady Blackadder.

When I came back to town, however, I consulted my calendar with some
anxiety, and set out to clear my path.

I have now practically withdrawn from political life. Letters have
passed; complimentary and sympathetic gentlemen have interviewed me
and tried to weaken my decision. The great Raggles has even called,
and dangled the seals of office before my eyes. I said they were very
pretty. He thought he had tempted me.

“Hang on as long as you can, for the sake of the Party.”

I spoke playfully of the Party (a man in my position, with one eye on
Time and the other on Eternity, develops an acute sense of values) and
Raggles held up horrified hands. To Raggles the Party is the Alpha and
Omega of things human and divine. It is the guiding principle of the
Cosmos. I could have spoken disrespectfully of the British Empire, of
which he has a confused notion; I could have dismissed the Trinity, on
which his ideas are vaguer, with an airy jest; in the expression of my
views concerning the Creator, whom he believes to be under the Party's
protection, I could have out-Pained Tom Paine, out-Taxiled Leo Taxil,
and he would not have winced. But to blaspheme against the Party was the
sin for which there was no redemption.

“I always thought you a serious politician!” he gasped.

“Good God!” I cried. “In my public utterances have I been as dull as
that? Ill-health or no, it is time for me to quit the stage.”

He laughed politely, because he conjectured I was speaking
humourously--he is astute in some things--and begged me to explain.

I replied that I did not regard mustard poultices as panaceas, the
_vox populi_ as the _Vox Dei_, or the policy of the other side as the
machinations of the Devil; that politics was all a game of guess-work
and muddle and compromise at the best; that, at the worst, as during
a General Election, it was as ignoble a pastime as the wit of man had
devised. To take it seriously would be the course of a fanatic, a man
devoid of the sense of proportion. Were such a man, I asked, fitted to
govern the country?

He did not stop to argue, but went away leaving me the conviction that
he thanked his stars on the Government's providential escape from so
maniacal a minister. I hope I did not treat him with any discourtesy;
but, oh! it was good to speak the truth after all the dismal lies I have
been forced to tell at the bidding of Raggle's Party. Now that I am no
longer bound by the rules of the game, it is good to feel a free, honest
man.

Never again shall I stretch forth my arms and thunder invectives against
well-meaning people with whom in my heart I secretly sympathise.
Never again shall I plead passionately for principles which a horrible
instinct tells me are fundamentally futile. Never again shall I attempt
to make mountains out of mole-hills or bricks without straw or sunbeams
out of cucumbers.

I shall conduct no more inquiries into pauper lunacy, thank Heaven! And
as for the public engagements which Dale Kynnersley made for me during
my Thebaid existence on Murglebed-on-Sea, the deuce can take them all--I
am free.

I only await the stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds, for which quaint
post under the Crown I applied, to cease to be a Member of Parliament.
And yet, in spite of all my fine and superior talk, I am glad I am
giving up in the recess. I should not like to be out of my seat were the
House in session.

I should hate to think of all the fascinating excitement over nothing
going on in the lobbies without me, while I am still hale and hearty.
When Parliament meets in February I shall either be comfortably dead or
so uncomfortably alive that I shall not care.

_Ce que c'est que de nous!_ I wonder how far Simon de Gex and I are
deceiving each other?



There is no deception about my old friend Latimer, who called on me a
day or two ago. He is on the Stock Exchange, and, muddle-headed creature
that he is, has been “bearing” the wrong things. They have gone up
sky-high. Settling-day is drawing near, and how to pay for the shares he
is bound to deliver he has not the faintest notion.

He stamped up and down the room, called down curses on the prying fools
who came across the unexpected streak of copper in the failing mine,
drew heart-rending pictures of his wife and family singing hymns in the
street, and asked me for a drink of prussic acid. I rang the bell and
ordered Rogers to give him a brandy and soda.

“Now,” said I, “talk sense. How much can you raise?”

He went into figures and showed me that, although he stretched his
credit to the utmost, there were still ten thousand pounds to be
provided.

“It's utter smash and ruin,” he groaned. “And all my accursed folly. I
thought I was going to make a fortune. But I'm done for now.” Latimer is
usually a pink, prosperous-looking man. Now he was white and flabby,
a piteous spectacle. “You are executor under my will,” he continued.
“Heaven knows I've nothing to leave. But you'll see things straight for
me, if anything happens? You will look after Lucy and the kids, won't
you?”

I was on the point of undertaking to do so, in the event of the
continuance of his craving for prussic acid, when I reflected upon my
own approaching bow and farewell to the world where Lucy and the kids
would still be wandering. I am always being brought up against this
final fireproof curtain. Suddenly a thought came which caused me to
exult exceedingly.

“Ten thousand pounds, my dear Latimer,” said I, “would save you from
being hammered on the Stock Exchange and from seeking a suicide's grave.
It would also enable you to maintain Lucy and the kids in your luxurious
house at Hampstead, and to take them as usual to Dieppe next summer. Am
I not right?”

He begged me not to make a jest of his miseries. It was like asking
a starving beggar whether a dinner at the Carlton wouldn't set him up
again.

“Would ten thousand set you up?” I persisted.

“Yes. But I might as well try to raise ten million.”

“Not so,” I cried, slapping him on the shoulder. “I myself will lend you
the money.”

He leaped to his feet and stared at me wildly in the face. He could not
have been more electrified if he had seen me suddenly adorned with wings
and shining raiment. I experienced a thrill of eumoiriety more exquisite
than I had dreamed of imagining.

“You?”

“Why not?”

“You don't understand. I can give you no security whatsoever.”

“I don't want security and I don't want interest,” I exclaimed, feeling
more magnanimous than I had a right to be, seeing that the interest
would be of no use to me on the other side of the Styx. “Pay me back
when and how you like. Come round with me to my bankers and I'll settle
the matter at once.”

He put out his hands; I thought he was about to fall at my feet; he
laughed in a silly way and, groping after brandy and soda, poured half
the contents of the brandy decanter on to the tray. I took him in a cab,
a stupefied man, to the bank, and when he left me at the door with my
draft in his pocket, there were tears in his eyes. He wrung my hand and
murmured something incoherent about Lucy.

“For Heaven's sake, don't tell her anything about it,” I entreated. “I
love Lucy dearly, as you know; but I don't want to have her weeping on
my door-mat.”

I walked back to my rooms with a springing step. So happy was I that I
should have liked to dance down Piccadilly. If the Faculty had not made
their pronouncement, I could have no more turned poor Latimer's earth
from hell to heaven than I could have changed St. Paul's Cathedral into
a bumblebee. The mere possibility of lending him the money would not
have occurred to me.

A man of modest fortune does not go about playing Monte Cristo. He gives
away a few guineas in charity; but he keeps the bulk of his fortune to
himself. The death sentence, I vow, has compensations. It enables a man
to play Monte Cristo or any other avatar of Providence with impunity,
and to-day I have discovered it to be the most fascinating game in the
world.

When Latimer recovers his equilibrium and regards the transaction in the
dry light of reason, he will diagnose a sure symptom of megalomania, and
will pity me in his heart for a poor devil.



I have seen Eleanor Faversham, and she has released me from my
engagement with such grace, dignity, and sweet womanliness that I wonder
how I could have railed at her thousand virtues.

“It's honourable of you to give me this opportunity of breaking it off,
Simon,” she said, “but I care enough for you to be willing to take my
chance of illness.”

“You do care for me?” I asked.

She raised astonished eyes. “If I didn't, do you suppose I should have
engaged myself to you? If I married you I should swear to cherish you in
sickness and in health. Why won't you let me?”

I was in a difficulty. To say that I was in ill-health and about to
resign my seat in Parliament and a slave to doctor's orders was one
thing; it was another to tell her brutally that I had received my death
warrant. She would have taken it much more to heart than I do.

The announcement would have been a shock. It would have kept the poor
girl awake of nights. She would have been for ever seeing the hand of
Death at my throat. Every time we met she would have noted on my face,
in my gait, infallible signs of my approaching end. I had not the right
to inflict such intolerable pain on one so near and dear to me.

Besides, I am vain enough to want to walk forth somewhat gallantly into
eternity; and while I yet live I particularly desire that folks should
not regard me as half-dead. I defy you to treat a man who is only going
to live twenty weeks in the same pleasant fashion as you would a man who
has the run of life before him.

There is always an instinctive shrinking from decay. I should think that
corpses must feel their position acutely.

It was entirely for Eleanor's sake that I refrained from taking her into
my confidence. To her question I replied that I had not the right to
tie her for life to a helpless valetudinarian. “Besides,” said I, “as
my health grows worse my jokes will deteriorate, until I am reduced to
grinning through a horse-collar at the doctor. And you couldn't stand
that, could you?”

She upbraided me gently for treating everything as a jest.

“It isn't that you want to get rid of me, Simon?” she asked tearfully,
but with an attempt at a smile.

I took both hands and looked into her eyes--they are brave, truthful
eyes--and through my heart shot a great pain. Till that moment I had not
realised what I was giving up. The pleasant paths of the world--I could
leave them behind with a shrug. Political ambition, power, I could
justly estimate their value and could let them pass into other hands
without regret. But here was the true, staunch woman, great of heart and
wise, a helper and a comrade, and, if I chose to throw off the jester
and become the lover in real earnest and sweep my hand across the
hidden chords, all that a woman can become towards the man she loves. I
realised this.

I realised that if she did not love me passionately now it was only
because I, in my foolishness, had willed it otherwise. For the first
time I longed to have her as my own; for the first time I rebelled.
I looked at her hungeringly until her cheeks grew red and her eyelids
fluttered. I had a wild impulse to throw my arms around her, and kiss
her as I had never kissed her before and bid her forget all that I had
said that day. Her faltering eyes told me that they read my longing. I
was about to yield when the little devil of a pain inside made itself
sharply felt and my madness went from me. I fetched a thing half-way
between a sigh and a groan, and dropped her hands.

“Need I answer your question?” I asked.

She turned her head aside and whispered “No.”

Presently she said, “I am glad I came back from Sicily. I shouldn't have
liked you to write this to me. I shouldn't have understood.”

“Do you now?”

“I think so.” She looked at me frankly. “Until just now I was never
quite certain whether you really cared for me.”

“I never cared for you so much as I do now, when I have to lose you.”

“And you must lose me?”

“A man in my condition would be a scoundrel if he married a woman.”

“Then it is very, very serious--your illness?”

“Yes,” said I, “very serious. I must give you your freedom whether you
want it or not.”

She passed one hand over the other on her knee, looking at the
engagement ring. Then she took it off and presented it to me, lying in
the palm of her right hand.

“Do what you like with it,” she said very softly.

I took the ring and slipped it on one of the right-hand fingers.

“It would comfort me to think that you are wearing it,” said I.

Then her mother came into the room and Eleanor went out. I am thankful
to say that Mrs. Faversham who is a woman only guided by sentiment when
it leads to a worldly advantage, applauded the step I had taken. As a
sprightly Member of Parliament, with an assured political and social
position, I had been a most desirable son-in-law. As an obscure invalid,
coughing and spitting from a bath-chair at Bournemouth (she took it for
granted that I was in the last stage of consumption), I did not take the
lady's fancy.

“My dear Simon,” replied my lost mother-in-law, “you have behaved
irreproachably. Eleanor will feel it for some time no doubt; but she is
young and will soon get over it. I'll send her to the Drascombe-Prynnes
in Paris. And as for yourself, your terrible misfortune will be as much
as you can bear. You mustn't increase it by any worries on her behalf.
In that way I'll do my utmost to help you.”

“You are kindness itself, Mrs. Faversham,” said I.

I bowed over the delighted lady's hand and went away, deeply moved by
her charity and maternal devotion.

But perhaps in her hardness lies truth. I have never touched Eleanor's
heart. No romance had preceded or accompanied our engagement. The
deepest, truest incident in it has been our parting.



CHAPTER VI

Dale's occupation, like Othello's, being gone, as far as I am concerned,
Lady Kynnersley has despatched him to Berlin, on her own business,
connected, I think, with the International Aid Society. He is to stay
there for a fortnight.

How he proposes to bear the separation from the object of his flame I
have not inquired; but if forcible objurgations in the vulgar tongue
have any inner significance, I gather that Lady Kynnersley has not
employed an enthusiastic agent.

Being thus free to pursue my eumoirous schemes without his intervention,
for you cannot talk to a lady for her soul's good when her adorer is
gaping at you, I have taken the opportunity to see something of Lola
Brandt.

I find I have seen a good deal of her; and it seems not improbable that
I shall see considerably more. Deuce take the woman!

On the first afternoon of Dale's absence I paid her my promised visit.
It was a dull day, and the room, lit chiefly by the firelight,
happily did not reveal its nerve-racking tastelessness. Lola Brandt,
supple-limbed and lazy-voiced, talked to me from the cushioned depths of
her chair.

We lightly touched on Dale's trip to Berlin. She would miss him
terribly. It was so kind of me to come and cheer her lonely hour.
Politeness forbade my saying that I had come to do nothing of the sort.
To my vague expression of courtesy she responded by asking me with a
laugh how I liked Mr. Anastasius Papadopoulos.

I replied that I considered it urbane on his part to invite me to see
his cats perform.

“If you were to hurt one of his cats he'd murder you,” she informed me.
“He always carries a long, sharp knife concealed somewhere about him on
purpose.”

“What a fierce little gentleman,” I remarked.

“He looks on me as one of his cats, too,” she said with a low laugh,
“and considers himself my protector. Once in Buda-Pesth he and I were
driving about. I was doing some shopping. As I was getting into the cab
a man insulted me, on account, I suppose, of my German name. Anastasius
sprang at him like a wild beast, and I had to drag him off bodily and
lift him back into the cab. I'm pretty strong, you know. It must have
been a funny sight.” She turned to me quickly. “Do you think it wrong of
me to laugh?”

“Why shouldn't you laugh at the absurd?”

“Because in devotion like that there seems to be something solemn
and frightening. If I told him to kill his cats, he would do it. If I
ordered him to commit Hari-Kari on the hearthrug, he would whip out his
knife and obey me. When you have a human soul at your mercy like that,
it's a kind of sacrilege to laugh at it. It makes you feel--oh, I can't
express myself. Look, it doesn't make tears come into your eyes exactly,
it makes them come into your heart.”

We continued the subject, divagating as we went, and had a nice little
sentimental conversation. There are depths of human feeling I should
never have suspected in this lazy panther of a woman, and although she
openly avows having no more education than a tinker's dog, she can talk
with considerable force and vividness of expression.

Indeed, when one comes to think of it, a tinker's dog has a fine
education if he be naturally a shrewd animal and takes advantage of his
opportunities; and a fine education, too, of its kind was that of
the vagabond Lola, who on her way from Dublin to Yokohama had more
profitably employed her time than Lady Kynnersley supposed. She had
seen much of the civilised places of the earth in her wanderings from
engagement to engagement, and had been an acute observer of men and
things.

We exchanged travel pictures and reminiscences. I found myself floating
with her through moonlit Venice, while she chanted with startling
exactness the cry of the gondoliers. To my confusion be it spoken, I
forgot all about Dale Kynnersley and my mission. The lazy voice and
rich personality fascinated me. When I rose to go I found I had spent a
couple of hours in her company. She took me round the room and showed me
some of her treasures.

“This is very old. I think it is fifteenth century,” she said, picking
up an Italian ivory.

It was. I expressed my admiration. Then maliciously I pointed to a
horrible little Tyrolean chalet and said:

“That, too, is very pretty.”

“It isn't. And you know it.”

She is a most disconcerting creature. I accepted the rebuke meekly. What
else could I do?

“Why, then, do you have it here?”

“It's a present from Anastasius,” she said. “Every time he comes to
see me he brings what he calls an _'offrande'_. All these things”--she
indicated, with a comprehensive sweep of the arm, the Union Jack
cushion, the little men mounting ladders inside bottles, the hen sitting
on her nest, and the other trumpery gimcracks--“all these things are
presents from Anastasius. It would hurt him not to see them here when he
calls.”

“You might have a separate cabinet,” I suggested.

“A chamber of horrors?” she laughed. “No. It gives him more pleasure to
see them as they are--and a poor little freak doesn't get much out of
life.”

She sighed, and picking up “A Present from Margate” kind of mug,
fingered it very tenderly.

I went away feeling angry. Was the woman bewitching me? And I felt
angrier still when I met Lady Kynnersley at dinner that evening. Luckily
I had only a few words with her. Had I done anything yet with regard to
Dale and the unmentionable woman? If I had told her that I had spent
a most agreeable afternoon with the enchantress, she would not have
enjoyed her evening. Like General Trochu of the Siege of Paris fame, I
said in my most mysterious manner, “I have my plan,” and sent her into
dinner comforted.

But I had no plan. My next interview with Madame Brandt brought me no
further. We have established telephonic communications. Through the
medium of this diabolical engine of loquacity and indiscretion, I was
prevailed on to accompany her to a rehearsal of Anastasius's cats.

Rogers, with a face as imperturbable as if he was announcing the visit
of an archbishop, informed me at the appointed hour that Madame Brandt's
brougham was at the door. I went down and found the brougham open, as
the day was fine, and Lola Brandt, smiling under a gigantic hat with an
amazing black feather, and looking as handsome as you please.

We were blocked for a few minutes at the mouth of the courtyard, and
I had the pleasure of all Piccadilly that passed staring at us in
admiration. Lola Brandt liked it; but I didn't, especially when I
recognised one of the starers as the eldest Drascombe-Prynne boy whose
people in Paris are receiving Eleanor Faversham under their protection.
A nice reputation I shall be acquiring. My companion was in gay mood.
Now, as it is no part of dealing unto oneself a happy life and portion
to damp a fellow creature's spirits, I responded with commendable
gaiety.

I own that the drive to Professor Anastasius Papadopoulos's cattery in
Rosebery Avenue, Clerkenwell, was distinctly enjoyable. I forgot all
about the little pain inside and the Fury with the abhorred shears, and
talked a vast amount of nonsense which the lady was pleased to regard
as wit, for she laughed wholeheartedly, showing her strong white, even
teeth. But why was I going?

Was it because she had requested me through the telephone to give
unimagined happiness to a poor little freak who would be as proud as
Punch to exhibit his cats to an English Member of Parliament? Was it
in order to further my designs--Machiavellian towards the lady, but
eumoirous towards Dale? Or was it simply for my own good pleasure?

Professor Anastasius Papadopoulos, resplendently raimented, with the
shiniest of silk hats and a flower in the buttonhole of his frock-coat,
received us at the door of a small house, the first-floor windows of
which announced the tenancy of a maker of gymnastic appliances; and
having kissed Madame Brandt's hand with awful solemnity and bowed deeply
to me, he preceded us down the passage, out into the yard, and into a
ramshackle studio at the end, where his cats had their being.

There were fourteen of them, curled up in large cages standing against
the walls. The place was lit by a skylight and warmed by a stove.
The floor, like a stage, was fitted up with miniature acrobatic
paraphernalia and properties. There were little five-barred gates, and
trapezes, and tight-ropes, and spring-boards, and a trestle-table, all
the metal work gleaming like silver. A heavy, uncouth German lad, whom
the professor introduced as his pupil and assistant, Quast, was in
attendance. Mr. Papadopoulos polyglotically acknowledged the honour I
had conferred upon him. He is very like the late Emperor of the French;
but his forehead is bulgier.

With a theatrical gesture and the remark that I should see, he opened
some cages and released half a dozen cats--a Persian, a white Angora,
and four commonplace tabbies, who all sprang on to the table with
military precision. Madame Brand began to caress them. I, wishing to
show interest in the troupe, prepared to do the same; but the dwarf
scurried up with a screech from the other end of the room.

_“Ne touchez pas--ne touchez pas!”_

I refrained, somewhat wonderingly, from touching. Madame Brandt
explained.

“He thinks you would spoil the magnetic influence. It is a superstition
of his.”

“But you are touching.”

“He believes I have his magnetism--whatever that may be,” she said, with
a smile. “Would you like to see an experiment? Anastasius!”

“Carissima.”

“Is that the untamed Persian you were telling me of?” she asked,
pointing to a cage from which a ferocious gigantic animal more like a
woolly tiger than a tom-cat looked out with expressionless yellow eyes.
“Will you let Mr. de Gex try to make friends with it?”

“Your will is law, meine Konigin,” replied Professor Papadopoulos,
bowing low. “But Hephaestus is as fierce as the flames of hell.”

“See what he'll do,” laughed Lola Brandt.

I approached the cage with an ingratiating, “Puss, puss!” and a hideous
growl welcomed me. I ventured my hand towards the bars. The beast
bristled in demoniac wrath, spat with malignant venom, and shot out its
claws. If I had touched it my hand would have been torn to shreds. I
have never seen a more malevolent, fierce, spiteful, ill-conditioned
brute in my life. My feelings being somewhat hurt, and my nerves a bit
shaken, I retreated hastily.

“Now look,” said Lola Brandt.

With absolute fearlessness she went up to the cage, opened it, took
the unresisting thing out by the scruff of its neck, held it up like a
door-mat, and put it on her shoulder, where it forthwith began to purr
like any harmless necessary cat and rub its head against her cheek. She
put it on the floor; it arched its back and circling sideways rubbed
itself against her skirts.

She sat down, and taking the brute by its forepaws made it stand on its
hind legs. She pulled it on to her lap and it curled round lazily. Then
she hoisted it on to her shoulder again, and, rising, crossed the room
and bowed to the level of the cage, when the beast leaped in purring
thunderously in high good humour. Mr. Papadopoulos sang out in
breathless delight:

“If I am the King of Cats, you, Carissima, are the Queen. Nay, more, you
are the Goddess!”

Lola Brandt laughed. I did not. It was uncanny. It seemed as if some
mysterious freemasonic affinity existed between her and the evil beast.
During her drive hither she had entered my own atmosphere. She had
been the handsome, unconventional woman of the world. Now she seemed as
remote from me as the witches in “Macbeth.”

If I had seen her dashing Paris hat rise up into a point and her
umbrella turn into a broomstick, and herself into one of the buxom
carlines of “Tam O'Shanter,” I should not have been surprised. The feats
of the mild pussies which the dwarf began forthwith to exhibit provoked
in me but a polite counterfeit of enthusiasm. Lola Brandt had discounted
my interest. Even his performance with the ferocious Persian lacked the
diabolical certainty of Lola's handling. He locked all the other cats up
and enticed it out of the cage with a piece of fish. He guided it with
a small whip, as it jumped over gates and through blazing hoops, and he
stood tense and concentrated, like a lion-tamer.

The act over, the cat turned and snarled and only jumped into its cage
after a smart flick of the whip. The dwarf did not touch it once with
his hands. I applauded, however, and complimented him. He laid his hand
on his heart and bent forward in humility.

“Ah, monsieur, I am but a neophyte where Madame is an expert. I know the
superficial nature of cats. Now and then without vainglory I can say I
know their hearts; but Madame penetrates to and holds commune with their
souls. And a cat's soul, monsieur, is a wonderful thing. Once it was
divine--in ancient Egypt. Doubtless monsieur has heard of Pasht? Holy
men spent their lives in approaching the cat-soul. Madame was born to
the privilege. Pasht watches over her.”

“Pasht,” I said politely in French, in reply to this clotted nonsense,
“was a great divinity. And for yourself, who knows but what you may have
been in a previous incarnation the keeper of the Sacred Cats in some
Egyptian temple.”

“I was,” he said, with staggering earnestness. “At Memphis.”

“One of these days,” I returned, with equal solemnity, “I hope for the
privilege of hearing some of your reminiscences. They would no doubt be
interesting.”

On the way back Lola thanked me for pretending to take the little man
seriously, and not laughing at him.

“If I hadn't,” said I, “he would have stuck his knife into me.”

She shook her head. “You did it naturally. I was watching you. It is
because you are a generous-hearted gentleman.”

Said I: “If you talk like that I'll get out and walk.”

And, indeed, what right had she to characterise the moral condition
of my heart? I asked her. She laughed her low, lazy laugh, but made no
reply. Presently she said:

“Why didn't you like my making friends with the cat?”

“How do you know I didn't like it?” I asked.

“I felt it.”

“You mustn't feel things like that,” I remarked. “It isn't good for
you.”

She insisted on my telling her. I explained as well as I could. She
touched the sleeve of my coat with her gloved hand.

“I'm glad, because it shows you take an interest in me. And I wanted
to let you see that I could do something besides loll about in
a drawing-room and smoke cigarettes. It's all I can do. But it's
something.” She said it with the humility of the Jongleur de Notre Dame
in Anatole Frances's story.

In Eaton Square, where I had a luncheon engagement, she dropped me, and
drove off smiling, evidently well pleased with herself. My hostess was
standing by the window when I was shown into the drawing-room. I noted
the faintest possible little malicious twinkle in her eye.

During the afternoon I had a telephonic message from my doctor, who
asked me why I had neglected him for a fortnight and urged me to go to
Harley Street at once. To humour him I went the next morning. Hunnington
is a bluff, hearty fellow who feeds himself into pink floridity so as to
give confidence to his patients. In answer to his renewed inquiry as to
my neglect, I remarked that a man condemned to be hanged doesn't seek
interviews with the judge in order to learn how the rope is getting on.
I conveyed to him politely, although he is an old friend, that I desired
to forget his well-fed existence. In his chatty way he requested me not
to be an ass, and proceeded to put to me the usual silly questions.

Remembering the result of my last visit, I made him happy by answering
them gloomily; whereupon he seized his opportunity and ordered me out
of England for the winter. I must go to a warm climate--Egypt, South
Africa, Madeira--I could take my choice. I flatly refused to obey. I had
my duties in London. He was so unsympathetic as to damn my duties. My
duty was to live as long as possible, and my wintering in London would
probably curtail my short life by two months. Then I turned on him
and explained the charitable disingenuousness of my replies to
his questions. He refused to believe me, and we parted with mutual
recriminations. I sent him next day, however, a brace of pheasants, a
present from Farfax Glenn. After all, he is one of God's creatures.

The next time I called on Lola Brandt I went with the fixed
determination to make some progress in my mission. I vowed that I would
not be seduced by trumpery conversation about Yokohama or allow my mind
to be distracted by absurd adventures among cats. I would clothe myself
in the armour of eumoiriety, and, with the sword of duty in my hand,
would go forth to battle with the enchantress. All said and done, what
was she but a bold-faced, strapping woman without an idea in her head
save the enslavement of an impressionable boy several years her junior?
It was preposterous that I, Simon de Gex, who had beguiled and fooled an
electorate of thirty thousand hard-headed men into choosing me for their
representative in Parliament, should not be a match for Lola Brandt.
As for her complicated feminine personality, her intuitiveness, her
magnetism, her fascination, all the qualities in fact which my poetical
fancy had assigned to her, they had no existence in reality. She was
the most commonplace person I had ever encountered, and I had been but a
sentimental lunatic.

In this truly admirable frame of mind I entered her drawing-room. She
threw down the penny novel she was reading, and with a little cry of joy
sprang forward to greet me.

“I'm so glad you've come. I was getting the blind hump!”

Did I not say she was commonplace? I hate this synonym for boredom.
It may be elegant in the mouth of a duchess and pathetic in that of an
oyster-wench, but it falls vulgarly from intermediate lips.

“What has given it to you?” I asked.

“My poor little ouistiti is dead. It is this abominable climate.”

I murmured condolences. I could not exhibit unreasonable grief at the
demise of a sick monkey which I had never seen.

“I'm also out of books,” she said, after having paid her tribute to the
memory of the departed. “I have been forced to ask the servants to lend
me something to read. Have you ever tried this sort of thing? You ought
to. It tells you what goes on in high society.”

I was sure it didn't. Not a duchess in its pages talked about having a
blind hump. I said gravely:

“I will ask you to lend it to me. Since Dale has been away I've had no
one to make out my library list.”

“Do turn Adolphus out of that chair and sit down,” she said, sinking
into her accustomed seat. Adolphus was the Chow dog before mentioned,
an accomplished animal who could mount guard with the poker and stand on
his head, and had been pleased to favour me with his friendship.

“I miss Dale greatly,” said I.

“I suppose you do. You are very fond of him?”

“Very,” said I. “By the by, how did you first come across Dale?”

She threw me a swift glance and smiled.

“Oh, in the most respectable way. I was dining at the Carlton with Sir
Joshua Oldfield, the famous surgeon, you know. He performed a silly
little operation on me last year, and since then we've been great
friends. Dale and some sort of baby boy were dining there, too, and
afterwards, in the lounge, Sir Joshua introduced them to me. Dale asked
me if he could call. I said 'Yes.' Perhaps I was wrong. Anyhow, _voila_!
Do you know Sir Joshua?”

“I sat next to him once at a public dinner. He's a friend of the
Kynnersleys. A genial old soul.”

“He's a dear!” said Lola.

“Do you know many of Dale's friends?” I asked.

“Hardly any,” she replied. “It's rather lonesome.” Then she broke into a
laugh.

“I was so terrified at meeting you the first time. Dale can talk of no
one else. He makes a kind of god of you. I felt I was going to hate you
like the devil. I expected quite a different person.”

The diplomatist listens to much and says little.

“Indeed,” I remarked.

She nodded. “I thought you would be a big beefy man with a red face, you
know. He gave me the idea somehow by calling you a 'splendid chap.' You
see, I couldn't think of a 'splendid chap' with a white face and a waxed
moustache and your way of talking.”

“I am sorry,” said I, “not to come up to your idea of the heroic.”

“But you do!” she cried, with one of her supple twists of the body. “It
was I that was stupid. And I don't hate you at all. You can see that I
don't. I didn't even hate you when you came as an enemy.”

“Ah!” said I. “What made you think that? We agreed to argue it out, if
you remember.”

She drew out of a case beside her one of her unspeakable cigarettes. “Do
you suppose,” she said, lighting it, and pausing to inhale the first
two or three puffs of smoke, “do you suppose that a woman who has lived
among wild beasts hasn't got instinct?”

I drew my chair nearer to the fire. She was beginning to be uncanny
again.

“I expected you were going to be horrified at the dreadful creature your
friend had taken up with. Oh, yes, I know in the eyes of your class
I'm a dreadful creature. I'm like a cat in many ways. I'm suspicious
of strangers, especially strangers of your class, and I sniff and sniff
until I feel it's all right. After the first few minutes I felt you were
all right. You're true and honourable, like Dale, aren't you?”

Like a panther making a sudden spring, she sat bolt upright in her chair
as she launched this challenge at me. Now, it is disconcerting to a man
to have a woman leap at his throat and ask him whether he is true and
honourable, especially when his attitude towards her approaches the
Machiavellian.

I could only murmur modestly that I hoped I could claim these
qualifications.

“And you don't think me a dreadful woman?”

“So far from it, Madame Brandt,” I replied, “that I think you a
remarkable one.”

“I wonder if I am,” she said, sinking back among her cushions. “I should
like to be for Dale's sake. I suppose you know I care a great deal for
Dale?”

“I have taken the liberty of guessing it,” said I. “And since you have
done me the honour of taking me so far into your confidence,” I added,
playing what I considered to be my master-card, “may I venture to ask
whether you have contemplated”--I paused--“marriage?”

Her brow grew dark, as she looked involuntarily at her bare left hand.

“I have got a husband already,” she replied.

As I expected. Ladies like Lola Brandt always have husbands unfit for
publication; and as the latter seem to make it a point of honour never
to die, widowed Lolas are as rare as blackberries in spring.

“Forgive my rudeness,” I said, “but you wear no wedding ring.”

“I threw it into the sea.”

“Ah!” said I.

“Do you want to hear about him?” she asked suddenly. “If we are to be
friends, perhaps you had better know. Somehow I don't like talking to
Dale about it. Do you mind putting some coals on the fire?”

I busied myself with the coal-scuttle, lit a cigarette, and settled down
to hear the story. If it had not been told in the twilight hour by a
woman with a caressing, enveloping voice like Lola Brandt's I should
have yawned myself out of the house.

It was a dismal, ordinary story. Her husband was a gentleman, a Captain
Vauvenarde in the French Army. He had fallen in love with her when she
had first taken Marseilles captive with the prodigiosities of her
horse Sultan. His proposals of manifold unsanctified delights met
with unqualified rejection by the respectable and not too passionately
infatuated Lola. When he nerved himself to the supreme sacrifice of
offering marriage she accepted.

She had dreams of social advancement, yearned to be one of the white
faces of the audience in the front rows. The civil ceremony having been
performed, he pleaded with her for a few weeks' secrecy on account of
his family. The weeks grew into months, during which, for the sake of
a livelihood, she fulfilled her professional engagements in many other
towns. At last, when she returned to Marseilles, it became apparent that
Captain Vauvenarde had no intention whatever of acknowledging her openly
as his wife. Hence many tears. Moreover, he had little beyond his pay
and his gambling debts, instead of the comfortable little fortune that
would have assured her social position. Now, officers in the French
Army who marry ladies with performing horses are not usually guided by
reason; and Captain Vauvenarde seems to have been the most unreasonable
being in the world. It was beneath the dignity of Captain Vauvenarde's
wife to make a horse do tricks in public, and it was beneath Captain
Vauvenarde's dignity to give her his name before the world. She must
neither be Lola Brandt nor Madame Vauvenarde. She must give up her
fairly lucrative profession and live in semi-detached obscurity up a
little back street on an allowance of twopence-halfpenny a week and be
happy and cheerful and devoted. Lola refused. Hence more tears.

There were scenes of frantic jealousy, not on account of any human
being, but on account of the horse. If she loved him as much as she
loved that abominable quadruped whose artificial airs and graces made
him sick every time he looked at it, she would accede to his desire.
Besides, he had the husband's right--a powerful privilege in France. She
pointed out that he could only exercise it by declaring her to be his
wife. Relations were strained. They led separate lives. From Marseilles
she went to Genoa, whither he followed her. Eventually he went away in a
temper and never came back. She had not heard from him since, and where
he was at the present moment she had not the faintest idea.

“So you went cheerfully on with your profession?” I remarked.

“I returned to Marseilles, and there I lost my horse Sultan. Then my
father died and left me pretty well off, and I hadn't the heart to train
another animal. So here I am. Ah!”

With one of her lithe movements she rose to her feet, and, flinging out
her arms in a wide gesture, began to walk about the room, stopping here
and there to turn on the light and draw the flaring chintz curtains. I
rose, too, so as to aid her. Suddenly as we met, by the window, she laid
both her hands on my shoulders and looked into my face earnestly and
imploringly, and her lips quivered. I wondered apprehensively what she
was going to do next.

“For God's sake, be my friend and help me!”

The cry, in her rich, low notes, seemed to come from the depths of the
woman's nature. It caused some absurd and unnecessary chord within me to
vibrate.

For the first time I realised that her strong, handsome face could look
nobly and pathetically beautiful. Her eyes swam in an adorable moisture
and grew very human and appealing. In a second all my self-denying
ordinances were forgotten. The witch had me in her power again.

“My dear Madame Brandt,” said I, “how can I do it?”

“Don't take Dale from me. I've lived alone, alone, alone all these
years, and I couldn't bear it.”

“Do you care for him so very much?”

She withdrew her hands and moved slightly. “Who else in the wide world
have I to care for?”

This was very pathetic, but I had the sense to remark that compromising
the boy's future was not the best way of showing her devotion.

“Oh, how could I do that?” she asked. “I can't marry him. And if I do
what I've never done before for any man--become his mistress--who need
know? I could stay in the background.”

“You seem to forget, dear lady,” said I, “that Captain Vauvenarde is
probably alive.”

“But I tell you I've lost sight of him altogether.”

“Are you quite so sure,” I asked, regaining my sanity by degrees, “that
Captain Vauvenarde has lost sight of you?”

She turned quickly. “What do you mean?”

“You have given him no chance as yet of recovering his freedom.”

She passed her hand over her face, and sat down on the sofa. “Do you
mean--divorce?”

“It's an ugly word, dear Madame Brandt,” said I, as gently as I could,
“but you and I are strong people and needn't fear uttering it. Don't
you think such a scandal would ruin Dale at the very beginning of his
career?”

There was a short silence. I was glad to see she was feminine enough to
twist and tear her handkerchief.

“What am I to do?” she asked at last. “I can't live this awful lonely
life much longer. Sometimes I get the creeps.”

I might have given her the sound advice to find healthy occupation
in training crocodiles to sit up and beg; but an idea which advanced
thinkers might classify as more suburban was beginning to take shape in
my mind.

“Has it occurred to you,” I said, “that now you have assumed the
qualifications imposed by Captain Vauvenarde for bearing his name?”

“I don't understand.”

“You no longer perform in public. He would have no possible grievance
against you.”

“Are you suggesting that I should go back to my husband?” she gasped.

“I am,” said I, feeling mighty diplomatic.

She looked straight in front of her, with parted lips, fingering her
handkerchief and evidently pondering the entirely new suggestion. I
thought it best to let her ponder. As a general rule, people will do
anything in the world rather than think; so, when one sees a human
being wrapped in thought, one ought to regard wilful disturbance of the
process as sacrilege. I lit a cigarette and wandered about the room.

Eventually I came to a standstill before the Venus of Milo. But while
I was admiring its calm, mysterious beauty, the development of a former
idea took the shape of an inspiration which made my heart sing. Fate had
put into my hands the chance of complete eumoiriety.

If I could effect a reconciliation between Lola Brandt and her husband,
Dale would be cured almost automatically of his infatuation, and
I should be the Deputy Providence bringing happiness to six human
beings--Lola Brandt, Captain Vauvenarde, Lady Kynnersley, Maisie
Ellerton, Dale, and Mr. Anastasius Papadopoulos, who could not fail to
be delighted at the happiness of his goddess.

There also might burst joyously on the earth a brood of gleeful little
Vauvenardes and merry little Kynnersleys, who might regard Simon de Gex
as their mythical progenitor. It might add to the gaiety of regiments
and the edification of parliaments. Acts should be judged, thought
I, not according to their trivial essence, but by the light of their
far-reaching consequences.

Lola Brandt broke the silence. She did not look at me. She said:

“I can't help feeling that you're my friend.”

“I am,” I cried, in the exultation of my promotion to the role of Deputy
Providence. “I am indeed. And a most devoted one.”

“Will you let me think over what you've said for a day or two--and then
come for an answer?”

“Willingly,” said I.

“And you won't----?”

“What?”

“No. I know you won't.”

“Tell Dale?” I said, guessing. “No, of course not.”

She rose and put out both her hands to me in a very noble gesture. I
took them and kissed one of them.

She looked at me with parted lips.

“You are the best man I have ever met,” she said.

At the moment of her saying it I believed it; such conviction is induced
by the utterances of this singular woman. But when I got outside the
drawing-room door my natural modesty revolted. I slapped my thigh
impatiently with what I thought were my gloves. They made so little
sound that I found there was only one. I had left the other inside. I
entered and found Lola Brandt in front of the fire holding my glove in
her hand. She started in some confusion.

“Is this yours?” she asked.

Now whose could it have been but mine? The ridiculous question worried
me, off and on, all the evening.



CHAPTER VII

The murder is out. A paragraph has appeared in the newspapers to the
effect that the marriage arranged between Mr. Simon de Gex and Miss
Eleanor Faversham will not take place. It has also become common
knowledge that I am resigning my seat in Parliament on account of
ill-health. That is the reason rightly assigned by my acquaintances for
the rupture of my engagement. I am being rapidly killed by the doleful
kindness of my friends. They are so dismally sympathetic. Everywhere I
go there are long faces and solemn hand-shakes. In order to cheer myself
I gave a little dinner-party at the club, and the function might have
been a depressed wake with my corpse in a coffin on the table. My
sisters, dear, kind souls, follow me with anxious eyes as if I were one
of their children sickening for chicken-pox. They upbraid me for leaving
them in ignorance, and in hushed voices inquire as to my symptoms. They
both came this morning to the Albany to see what they could do for me.
I don't see what they can do, save help Rogers put studs in my shirts.
They expressed such affectionate concern that at last I cried out:

“My dear girls, if you don't smile, I'll sit upon the hearthrug and howl
like a dog.”

Then they exchanged glances and broke into hectic gaiety, dear things,
under the impression that they were brightening me up. I am being
deluged with letters. I had no idea I was such a popular person. They
come from high placed and lowly, from constituents whom my base and
servile flattery have turned into friends, from Members of Parliament,
from warm-hearted dowagers and from little girls who have inveigled me
out to lunch for the purpose of confiding to me their love affairs. I
could set up as a general practitioner of medicine on the advice that is
given me. I am recommended cod-liver oil, lung tonic, electric massage,
abdominal belts, warm water, mud baths, Sandow's treatment, and every
patent medicament save rat poison. I am urged to go to health resorts
ranging geographically from the top of the Jungfrau to Central Africa.
All kinds of worthy persons have offered to nurse me. Old General Wynans
writes me a four-page letter to assure me that I have only to go to his
friend Dr. Eustace Adams, of Wimpole Street, to be cured like a shot. I
happen to know that Eustace Adams is an eminent gynecologist.

And the worst of it all is that these effusions written in the milk of
human kindness have to be answered. Dale is not here. I have to sit down
at my desk and toil like a galley slave. I am being worn to a shadow.

Lola Brandt, too, has heard the news, Dale in Berlin, and the London
newspapers being her informants. Tears stood in her eyes when I called
to learn her decision. Why had I not told her I was so ill? Why had I
let her worry me with her silly troubles? Why had I not consulted
her friend, Sir Joshua Oldfield? She filled up my chair with cushions
(which, like most men, I find stuffy and comfortless), and if I had
given her the slightest encouragement, would have stuck my feet in hot
mustard and water. Why had I come out on such a dreadful day? It was
indeed a detestable day of raw fog. She pulled the curtains close, and,
insisting upon my remaining among my cushions, piled the grate with coal
half-way up the chimney. Would I like some eucalyptus?

“My dear Madame Brandt,” I cried, “my bronchial tubes and lungs are as
strong as a hippopotamus's.”

I wish every one would not conclude that I was going off in a rapid
decline.

Lola Brandt prowled about me in a wistful, mothering way, showing me a
fresh side of her nature. She is as domesticated as Penelope.

“You're fond of cooking, aren't you?” I asked suddenly.

She laughed. “I adore it. How do you know?”

“I guessed,” said I.

“I'm what the French call a _vraie bourgeoise_.”

“I'm glad to hear it,” said I.

“Are you? I thought your class hated the _bourgeoisie_.”

“The _bourgeoisie_,” I said, “is the nation's granary of the virtues.
But for God's sake, don't tell any one that I said so!”

“Why?” she asked.

“If it found its way into print it would ruin my reputation for
epigram.”

She drew a step or two towards me in her slow rhythmic way, and smiled.

“When you say or do a beautiful thing you always try to bite off its
tail.”

Then she turned and drew some needlework--plain sewing I believe they
call it--from beneath the Union Jack cushion and sat down.

“I'll make a confession,” she said. “Until now I've stuffed away my work
when I heard you coming. I didn't think it genteel. What do you think?”

I scanned the shapeless mass of linen or tulle or whatever it was on her
lap.

“I don't know whether it's genteel,” I remarked, “but at present it
looks like nothing on God's earth.”

My masculine ignorance of such mysteries made her laugh. She is readily
moved to mild mirth, which makes her an easy companion. Besides, little
jokes are made to be laughed at, and I like women who laugh at them.
There was a brief silence. I smoked and made Adolphus stand up on his
hind legs and balance sugar on his nose. His mistress sewed. Presently
she said, without looking up from her work:

“I've made up my mind.”

I rose from my cushioned seat, into which Adolphus, evidently thinking
me a fool, immediately snuggled himself, and I stood facing her with my
back to the fire.

“Well?” said I.

“I am ready to go back to my husband, if he can be found, and, of
course, if he will have me.”

I commended her for a brave women. She smiled rather sadly and shook her
head.

“Those are two gigantic 'ifs.'”

“Giants before now have been slain by the valiant,” I replied.

“How is Captain Vauvenarde to be found?”

“An officer in the French Army is not like a lost sparrow in London. His
whereabouts could be obtained from the French War Office. What is his
regiment?”

“The Chasseurs d'Afrique. Yes,” she added thoughtfully. “I see, it isn't
difficult to trace him. I make one condition, however. You can't refuse
me.”

“What is that?”

“Until things are fixed up everything must go on just as at present
between Dale and me. He is not to be told anything. If nothing comes
of it then I'll have him all to myself. I won't give him up and be left
alone. As long as I care for him, I swear to God, I won't!” she said, in
her low, rich voice--and I saw by her face that she was a woman of her
word. “Besides, he would come raving and imploring--and I'm not quite
a woman of stone. It isn't all jam to go back to my husband. Goodness
knows why I am thinking of it. It's for your sake. Do you know that?”

I did not. I was puzzled. Why in the world should Lola Brandt, whom I
have only met three or four times, revolutionise the whole of her life
for my sake?

“I should have thought it was for Dale's,” said I.

“I suppose you would, being a man,” she replied.

I retorted, with a smile: “Woman is the eternal conundrum to which the
wise man always leaves her herself to supply the answer. Doubtless one
of these days you'll do it. Meanwhile, I'll wait in patience.”

She gave me one of her sidelong, flashing glances and sewed with more
vigour than appeared necessary. I admired the beautiful curves of her
neck and shoulders as she bent over her work. She seemed too strong to
wield such an insignificant weapon as a needle.

“That's neither here nor there,” she said in reference to my last
remark. “I say, I don't look forward to going back to my husband--though
why I should say 'going back' I don't know, as he left me--not I him.
Anyhow, I'm ready to do it. If it can be managed, I'll cut myself adrift
suddenly from Dale. It will be more merciful to him. A man can bear a
sudden blow better than lingering pain. If it can't be managed, well,
Dale will know nothing at all about it, and both he and I will be saved
a mortal deal of worry and unhappiness.”

“Suppose” said I, “it can't be managed? Do you propose to keep Dale
ignorant of the danger he is running in keeping up a liaison with a
married woman living apart from her husband?”

She reflected. “If my husband says he'll see me damned first before
he'll come back to me, then I'll tell Dale everything, and you can say
what you like to him. He'll be able to judge for himself; but in the
meanwhile you'll let me have what happiness I can.”

I accepted the compromise, and, dispossessing Adolphus, sat down again.
I certainly had made progress. Feeling in a benevolent mood, I set forth
the advantages she would reap by assuming her legal status; how at last
she would shake the dust of Bohemia from off her feet, and instead of
standing at the threshold like a disconsolate Peri, she would enter as a
right the Paradise of Philistia which she craved; how her life would be
one continual tea-party, and how, as her husband had doubtless by this
time obtained his promotion, she would be authorised to adopt high and
mighty airs in her relations with the wives of all the captains and
lieutenants in the regiment. She sighed and wondered whether she would
like it, after all.

“Here in England I can say 'damn' as often as I choose. I don't say it
very often, but sometimes I feel I must say it or explode.”

“There are its equivalents in French,” I suggested.

She laughed outright. “Fancy my coming out with a _sacre nom de Dieu_ in
a French drawing-room!”

“Fancy you shouting 'damn' in an English one.”

“That's true,” she said. “I suppose drawing-rooms are the same all the
world over. I do try to talk like a lady--at least, what I imagine they
talk like, for I've never met one.”

“You see one every time you look in the glass,” said I.

Her olive face flushed. “You mustn't say such things to me if you don't
mean them. I like to think all you say to me is true.”

“Why in the world,” I cried, “should you not be a lady? You have the
instincts of one. How many of my fair friends in Mayfair and Belgravia
would have made their drawing-rooms unspeakable just for the sake of not
hurting the feelings of Anastasius Papadopoulos?”

She put aside her work and, leaning over the arm of the chair, her chin
in her hands, looked at me gratefully.

“I'm so glad you've said that. Dale can't understand it. He wants me to
clear the trash away.”

“Dale,” said I, “is young and impetuous. I am a battered old philosopher
with one foot in the grave.”

Quick moisture gathered in her eyes. “You hurt me,” she said. “You'll
soon get well and strong again. You must!”

“_Ce que femme veut, Dieu le veut_,” I laughed.

“_Eh bien, je le veux_,” she said with an odd expression in her eyes
which burned golden. They fascinated me, held mine. For some seconds
neither of us moved. Just consider the picture. There among the cushions
of her chair she sprawled beneath the light of a shaded lamp on the
further side, and in front of the leaping flames, a great, powerful,
sinuous creature of sweeping curves, clad in a clinging brown dress, her
head crowned with superb bronze hair, two warm arms bare to the elbow,
at which the sleeve ended in coffee-coloured lace falling over the side
of the chair, and her leopard eyes fixed on me. About her still hung the
echo of her last words spoken in deep tones whose register belongs less
to human habitations than to the jungle. And from her emanated like
a captivating odour--but it was not an odour--a strange magnetic
influence.

I have done my best to write her down in my mind a commonplace, vulgar,
good-natured mountebank. But I can do so no longer.

There is something deep down in the soul of Lola Brandt which sets her
apart from the kindly race of womankind; whether it is the devil or
a touch of pre-Adamite splendour or an ancestral catamount, I make
no attempt to determine. At any rate, she is too grand a creature to
fritter her life away on a statistic-hunting and pheasant-shooting young
Briton like Dale Kynnersley. He would never begin to understand her. I
will save her from Dale for her own sake.

All this, ladies and gentlemen, because her eyes fascinated me, and
caused me to hold my breath, and made my heart beat.

And will Captain Vauvenarde understand her? Of course he won't. But then
he is her husband, and husbands are notoriously and _cum privilegio_
dunder-headed. I make no pretensions to understand her, but as I am
neither her lover nor her husband it does not matter. She says nothing
diabolical or eerie or fantastic or feline or pre-Adamite or uncanny or
spiritual; and yet she _is_, in a queer, indescribable way, all these
things.

“_Je le veux_,” she said, and we drank in each other's souls, or
gaped at each other like a pair of idiots just as you please. I had a
horrible, yet pleasurable consciousness that she had gripped hold of my
nerves of volition. She was willing me to live. I was a puppet in her
hands like the wild tom-cat. At that moment I declare I could have
purred and rubbed my head against her knee. I would have done anything
she bade me. If she had sent me to fetch the Cham of Tartary's cap or a
hair of the Prester John's beard, I would have telephoned forthwith to
Rogers to pack a suit-case and book a seat in the Orient express.

What would have happened next Heaven alone knows--for we could not have
gone on gazing at each other until I backed myself out at the door by
way of leave-taking--had not Anticlimax arrived in the person of Mr.
Anastasius Papadopoulos in his eternal frock-coat. But his gloves were
black.

As usual he fell on his knees and kissed his lady's hand. Then he rose
and greeted me with solemn affability.

“_C'est un privilege de rencontrer den gnadigsten Herrn_,” said he.

Confining myself to one language, I responded by informing him that
it was an honour always to meet so renowned a professor, and inquired
politely after the health of Hephaestus.

“Ah, Signore!” he cried. “Do not ask me. It is a tragedy from which I
shall never recover.”

He sat down on a footstool by the side of Madame Brandt and burst into
tears, which coursed down his cheeks and moustache and hung like drops
of dew from the point of his imperial.

“Is he dead?” asked Madame.

“I wish he were! No. It is only the iron self-restraint that I possess
which prevented me from slaying him on the spot. But poor Santa Bianca!
My gentle and accomplished Angora. He has killed her. I can scarcely
raise my head through grief.”

Lola put her great arm round the little man's neck and patted him like a
child, while he sobbed as if his heart would break.

When he recovered he gave us the details of the tragic end of Santa
Bianca, and wound up by calling down the most ingeniously complicated
and passionate curses on the head of the murderer. Lola Brandt strove to
pacify him.

“We all have our sorrows, Anastasius. Did I not lose my beautiful horse
Sultan?”

The professor sprang to his full height of four feet and dashed away his
tears with a noble gesture of his black-gloved hand.

Base slave that he was to think of his own petty bereavement in the face
of her eternal affliction. He turned to me and bade me mark her serene
nobility. It was a model and an example for him to follow. He, too,
would be brave and present a smiling face to evil fortune.

“Behold! I smile, carissima!” he cried dramatically.

We beheld--and saw his features (smudged with tearstains and the dye
from the black gloves which he obviously wore out of respect for the
deceased Santa Bianca) contorted into a grimace of hideous imbecility.

“Monsieur,” said he, assuming his natural expression which was one of
pensive melancholy, “let us change the conversation. You are a great
statesman. Will you kindly let me know your opinion on the foreign
policy of Germany?”

Whereupon he sat down again upon his stool and regarded me with earnest
attention.

“Germany,” said I, with the solemnity of a Sir Oracle in the
smoking-room of one of the political clubs, “has dreams of an empire
beyond her frontiers, and with a view to converting the dream into a
reality, is turning out battleships nineteen to the dozen.”

The Professor nodded his head sagaciously, and looked up at Lola.

“Very profound,” said he, “very profound. I shall remember it. I am
a Greek, Monsieur, and the Greeks, as you know, are a nation of
diplomatists.”

“Ever since the days of Xenophon,” said I.

“You're both too clever for me,” exclaimed our hostess. “Where did you
get your knowledge from, Anastasius?”

The Professor, flattered, passed his hand over his bulgy forehead.

“I was a great student in my youth,” said he. “Once I could tell you all
the kings of Rome and the date of the battle of Actium. But pressure of
weightier concerns has driven my erudition from me. Pardon me. I have
not yet asked after your health. You are looking sad and troubled. What
is the matter?”

He sat bolt upright, fingering his imperial and regarding her with the
keen solicitude of a family physician. To my amazement, Lola Brandt told
him quite simply:

“I am thinking of living with my husband again.”

“Has the traitor been annoying you?” he asked with a touch of
fierceness.

“Oh, no! It's my own idea. I'm tired of living alone. I don't even know
where he is.”

“Do you want to know where he is?”

“How can I communicate with him unless I do?”

Anastasius Papadopoulos rose, struck an attitude, and thumped his
breast.

“I will seek him for you at the ends of the earth, and will bring him to
prostrate himself at your feet.”

“That's very kind of you, Anastasius,” said Lola gently; “but what will
become of your cats?”

The dwarf raised his hand impressively.

“The Almighty will have them in His keeping. I have also my pupil and
assistant, Quast.”

Lola smiled indulgently from her cushions, showing her curious even
teeth.

“You mustn't do anything so mad, Anastasius, I forbid you.”

“Madame,” said he in a most stately manner, “when I devote myself, it is
to the death. I have the honour to salute you!”--he bowed over her
hand and kissed it. “Monsieur.” He bowed to me with the profundity of a
hidalgo, and trotted magnificently out of the room.

It was all so sudden that it took my breath away.

“Well I'm----” I didn't know what I was, so I stopped. Lola Brandt broke
into low laughter at my astonishment.

“That's Anastasius's way,” she explained.

“But the little man surely isn't going to leave his cats and start on a
wild-goose chase over Europe to find your husband?”

“He thinks he is, but I shan't let him.”

“I hope you won't,” said I. “And will you tell me why you made so
hot-headed a person your confidant?”

I confess that I was wrathful. Here had I been using the wiles of a
Balkan chancery to bring the lady to my way of thinking, and here was
she, to my face, making a joke of it with this caricature of a Paladin.

“My dearest friend,” she replied earnestly, “don't be angry with me.
I've given the poor little man something to think of besides the death
of his cat. It will do him good. And why shouldn't I tell him? He's a
dear old friend, and in his way was so good to me when I was unhappy. He
knows all about my married life. You may think he's half-witted; but he
isn't. In ordinary business dealings he's as shrewd as they make 'em.
The manager who beats Anastasius over a contract is yet to be born.”

By some extraordinary process of the contortionist's art, she curled
herself out of her chair on to the hearthrug and knelt before me, her
hands clasped on my knee.

“You're not angry with me, are you?” she asked in her rich contralto.

I took both her hands, rose, and assisted her to rise. I was not going
to be mesmerised again.

“Of course not,” I laughed. Indeed my wrath had fallen from me.

Her bosom heaved with a sigh. “I'm so glad,” she said. Her breath fanned
my cheek. It was aromatic, intoxicating. Her lips are ripe and full.

“You had better find your husband as soon as possible,” said I.

“Do you think so?” she asked.

“Yes, I do. And it strikes me I had better go and find him myself.”

She started. “You?”

“Yes,” I said. “The Chasseurs d'Afrique are probably in Africa, and the
doctors have ordered me to winter in a hot climate, and I shall go on
writing a million letters a day if I stay here, which will kill me off
in no time with brain fag and writer's cramp. Your husband will be what
the newspapers call an objective. Good-bye!” said I, “I'll bring him to
you dead or alive.”

And without knowing it at the time, I made an exit as magnificent as
that of Professor Anastasius Papadopoulos.



CHAPTER VIII

I do not know whether I ought to laugh or rail. Judged by the ordinary
canons that regulate the respectable life to which I have been
accustomed, I am little short of a lunatic. The question is: Does
the recognition of lunacy in oneself tend to amusement or anger? I
compromise with myself. I am angry at having been forced on an insane
adventure, but the prospect of its absurdity gives me a considerable
pleasure.

Let me set it down once and for all. I resent Lola Brandt's existence.
When I am out of her company I can contemplate her calmly from my
vantage of social and intellectual superiority. I can pooh-pooh her
fascinations. I can crack jokes on her shortcomings. I can see perfectly
well that I am Simon de Gex, M.P. (I have not yet been appointed to
the stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds), of Eton and Trinity College,
Cambridge, a barrister of the Inner Temple (though a brief would cause
me as much dismay as a command to conduct the orchestra at Covent
Garden), formerly of the Foreign Office, a man of the world, a
diner-out, a hardened jester at feminine wiles, a cynical student of
philosophy, a man of birth, and, I believe, breeding with a cultivated
taste in wine and food and furniture, one also who, but for a little
pain inside, would soon become a Member of His Majesty's Government,
and eventually drop the “Esquire” at the end of his name and stick “The
Right Honourable” in front of it--in fact, a most superior, wise and
important person; and I can also see perfectly well that Lola Brandt
is an uneducated, lowly bred, vagabond female, with a taste, as I have
remarked before, for wild beasts and tea-parties, with whom I have
as much in common as I have with the feathered lady on a coster's
donkey-cart or the Fat Woman at the Fair. I can see all this perfectly
well in the calm seclusion of my library. But when I am in her
presence my superiority, like Bob Acres's valour, oozes out through my
finger-tips; I become a besotted idiot; the sense and the sight and
the sound of her overpower me; I proclaim her rich and remarkable
personality; and I bask in her lazy smiles like any silly undergraduate
whose knowledge of women has hitherto been limited to his sisters and
the common little girl at the tobacconist's.

I say I resent it. I resent the low notes in her voice. I resent the
cajolery of the supple twists of her body. I resent her putting her
hands on my shoulders, and, as the twopenny-halfpenny poets say, fanning
my cheek with her breath. If it had not been for that I should never
have promised to go in search of her impossible husband. At any rate, it
is easy to discover his whereabouts. A French bookseller has telegraphed
to Paris for the _Annuaire Officiel de l'Armee Francaise_, the French
Army List. It locates every officer in the French army, and as the
Chasseurs d'Afrique generally chase in Africa, it will tell me the
station in Algeria or Tunisia which Captain Vauvenarde adorns. I can
go straight to him as Madame Brandt's plenipotentiary, and if the
unreasonable and fire-eating warrior does not run me through the body
for impertinence before he has time to appreciate the delicacy of my
mission, I may be able to convince him that a well-to-do wife is worth
the respectable consideration of a hard-up captain of Chasseurs. I say
I may be able to convince him; but I shrink from the impudence of the
encounter. I am to accost a total stranger in a foreign army and tell
him to return to his wife. This is the pretty little mission I have
undertaken. It sounded glorious and eumoirous and quixotic and deucedly
funny, during the noble moment of inspiration, when Lola's golden eyes
were upon me; but now--well, I shall have to persuade myself that it is
funny, if I am to carry it out. It is very much like wagering that one
will tweak by the nose the first gentleman in gaiters and shovel-hat
one meets in Piccadilly. This by some is considered the quintessence of
comedy. I foresee a revision of my sense of humour.

This afternoon I met Lady Kynnersley again--at the Ellertons'. I was
talking to Maisie, who has grown no happier, when I saw her sailing
across to me with questions hoisted in her eyes. Being particularly
desirous not to report progress periodically to Lady Kynnersley, I made
a desperate move. I went forward and greeted her.

“Lady Kynnersley,” said I, “somebody was telling me that you are in
urgent need of funds for something. With my usual wooden-headedness I
have forgotten what it is--but I know it is a deserving organisation.”

The philanthropist, as I hoped, ousted the mother. She exclaimed at
once:

“It must have been the Cabmen and Omnibus Drivers' Rheumatic Hospital.”

“That was it!” said I, hearing of the institution for the first time.

“They are martyrs to rheumatic gout, and of course have no means of
obtaining proper treatment; so we have secured a site at Harrogate and
are building a comfortable place, half hospital, half hotel, where they
can be put up for a shilling a day and have all the benefits of the
waters just as if they were staying at the Hotel Majestic. Do you want
to become a subscriber?”

“I am eager to,” said I.

“Then come over here and I'll tell you all about it.”

I sat with her in a corner of the room and listened to her fairy-tale.
She wrung my heart to such a pitch of sympathy that I rose and grasped
her by the hand.

“It is indeed a noble project,” I cried. “I love the London cabby as my
brother, and I'll post you a cheque for a thousand pounds this evening.
Good-bye!”

I left her in a state of joyous stupefaction and made my escape. If it
had not fallen in with my general scheme of good works I should regard
it as an expensive method of avoiding unpleasant questions.

Another philanthropist, by the way, of quite a different type from Lady
Kynnersley, who has lately benefited by my eleemosynary mania is Rex
Campion. I have known him since our University days and have maintained
a sincere though desultory friendship with him ever since. He is also a
friend of Eleanor Faversham, whom he now and then inveigles into weird
doings in the impossible slums of South Lambeth. He has tried on many
occasions to lure me into his web, but hitherto I have resisted.
Being the possessor of a large fortune, he has been able to gratify a
devouring passion for philanthropy, and has squandered most of his money
on an institution--a kind of club, school, labour-bureau, dispensary,
soup-kitchen, all rolled into one--in Lambeth; and there he
lives himself, perfectly happy among a hungry, grubby, scarecrow,
tatterdemalion crowd. At a loss for a defining name, he has called it
“Barbara's Building,” after his mother. His conception of the cosmos
is that sun, moon and stars revolve round Barbara's Building. How he
learned that I was, so to speak, standing at street corners and flinging
money into the laps of the poor and needy, I know not. But he came to
see me a day or two ago, full of Barbara's Building, and departed in
high feather with a cheque for a thousand pounds in his pocket.

I may remark here on the peculiar difficulty there is in playing Monte
Cristo with anything like picturesque grace. Any dull dog that owns
a pen and a banking-account can write out cheques for charitable
institutions. But to accomplish anything personal, imaginative,
adventurous, anything with a touch of distinction, is a less easy
matter. You wake up in the morning with the altruistic yearnings of a
St. Francois de Sales, and yet somehow you go to bed in the evening with
the craving unsatisfied. You have really had so few opportunities; and
when an occasion does arise it is hedged around with such difficulties
as to baffle all but the most persistent. Have you ever tried to give a
beggar a five-pound note? I did this morning.

She was a miserable, shivering, starving woman of fifty selling matches
in Sackville Street. She held out a shrivelled hand to me, and eyes that
once had been beautiful pleaded hungrily for alms.

“Here,” said I to myself, “is an opportunity of bringing unimagined
gladness for a month or two into this forlorn creature's life.”

I pressed a five-pound note into her hand and passed on. She ran after
me, terror on her face.

“I daren't take it, sir; they would say I had stolen it, and I should be
locked up. No one would believe a gentleman had given it to me.”

She trembled, overwhelmed by the colossal fortune that might, and yet
might not, be hers. I sympathised, but not having the change in gold, I
could do no more than listen to an incoherent tale of misery, which did
not aid the solution of the problem. It was manifestly impossible to
take back the note; and yet if she retained it she would be subjected
to scandalous indignities. What was to be done? I turned my eyes
towards Piccadilly and beheld a policeman. A page wearing the name of a
milliner's shop on his cap whisked past me. I stopped him and slipped a
shilling into his hand.

“Will you ask that policeman to come to me?”

The boy tore down the street and told the policeman and followed him up
to me, eager for amusement.

“What has the woman been doing, sir?” asked the policeman.

“Nothing,” said I. “I have given her a five-pound note.”

“What for, sir?” he asked.

“To further my pursuit of the eumoirous,” said I, whereat he gaped
stolidly; “but, be that as it may, I have given it her as a free gift,
and she is afraid to present it anywhere lest she should be charged with
theft. Will you kindly accompany her to a shop, where she can change it,
and vouch for her honesty?”

The policeman, who seemed to form the lowest opinion of my intellect,
said he didn't know a shop on his beat where they could change it. The
boy whistled. The woman held the box of matches in one hand, and in the
other the note, fluttering in the breeze. Idlers paused and looked on.
The policeman grew authoritative and bade them pass along. They crowded
all the more. My position was becoming embarrassing. At last the boy,
remembering the badge of honour on his cap, undertook to change the note
at the hatter's at the corner of the street. So, having given the note
to the boy and bidden the policeman follow him to see fair play, and
encouraged the woman to follow the policeman, I resumed my walk down
Sackville Street.

But what a pother about a simple act of charity! In order to repeat it
habitually I shall have to rely on the fortuitous attendance of a boy
and a policeman, or have a policeman and a boy permanently attached to
my person, which would be as agreeable as the continuous escort of a
jackdaw and a yak.



Poor Latimer is having a dreadful time. Apparently my ten thousand
pounds have vanished like a snowflake on the river of liabilities. How
he is to repay me he does not know. He wishes he had not yielded to
temptation and had allowed himself to be honestly hammered. Then
he could have taken his family to sing in the streets with a quiet
conscience.

“My dear fellow,” said I through the telephone this morning. “What are
ten thousand pounds to me?”

I heard him gasp at the other end.

“But you're not a millionaire!”

“I am!” I cried triumphantly. And now I come to think of it, I spoke
truly. If a man reckons his capital as half a year's income, doubles it,
and works out the capital that such a yearly income represents, he is
the possessor of a mint of money.

“I am,” I cried; “and I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll settle five
thousand on Lucy and the children, so that they needn't accompany you
in your singing excursions. I shouldn't like them to catch cold, poor
dears, and ruin their voices.”

In tones more than telephonically agonised he bade me not make a jest of
his misery. I nearly threw the receiver at the blockhead.

“I'm not jesting,” I bawled; “I'm deadly serious. I knew Lucy before you
did, and I kissed her and she kissed me years before she knew of your
high existence; and if she had been a sensible woman she would have
married me instead of you--what? The first time you've heard of it? Of
course it is--and be decently thankful that you hear it now.”

It is pleasant sometimes to tell the husbands of girls you have loved
exactly what you think of them; and I had loved Lucy Latimer. She came,
an English rose, to console me for the loss of my French _fleur-de-lis_,
Clothilde. Or was it the other way about? One does get so mixed in these
things. At any rate, she did not marry me, her first love, but jilted me
most abominably for Latimer. So I shall heap five thousand pounds on her
head.

I have been unfortunate in my love affairs. I wonder why? Which reminds
me that I made the identical remark to Lucy Latimer a month or two ago.
(She is a plump, kind, motherly, unromantic little person now.) She had
the audacity to reply that I had never had any.

“_You_, Lucy Crooks, dare say such a thing!” I exclaimed indignantly.

She smiled. “Are there many more qualified than I to give the opinion?”

I remember that I rose and looked her sternly in the face.

“Lucy Crooks or Lucy Latimer,” said I, “you are nothing more or less
than a common hussy.”

Whereupon she laughed as if I had paid her a high compliment.

I maintain that I have been unfortunate in my love affairs. First, there
was an angel-faced widow, a contemporary of my mother's, whom I wooed in
Greek verses--and let me tell the young lover that it is much easier
to write your own doggerel and convert it into Greek than to put “To
Althea” into decent Anacreontics. I also took her to the Eton and Harrow
match, and talked to her of women's hats and the things she loved, and
neglected the cricket. But she would have none of me. In the flood tide
of my passion she married a scorbutic archdeacon of the name of Jugg.
Then there was a lady whose name for the life of me I can't remember. It
was something ending in “-ine.” We quarrelled because we held divergent
views on Mr. Wilson Barrett. Then there was Clothilde, whose tragical
story I have already unfolded; Lucy Crooks, who threw me over for this
dear, amiable, wooden-headed stockjobbing Latimer; X, Y and Z--but here,
let me remark, I was the hunted--mammas spread nets for me which by the
grace of heaven and the ungraciousness of the damsels I escaped; and,
lastly, my incomparable Eleanor Faversham. Now, I thought, am I safe
in harbour? If ever a match could have been labelled “Pure heaven-made
goods, warranted not to shrink”--that was one. But for this rupture
there is an all-accounting reason. For the others there was none. I vow
I went on falling in love until I grew absolutely sick and tired of the
condition. You see, the vocabulary of the pastime is so confoundedly
limited. One has to say to B what one has said to A; to C exactly
what one has said to A and B; and when it comes to repeating to F
the formularies one has uttered to A, B, C, D and E one grows almost
hysterical with the boredom of it. That was the delightful charm of
Eleanor Faversham; she demanded no formularies or re-enactment of
raptures.

The _Annuaire Officiel de l'Armee Francaise_ has arrived. It is a volume
of nearly eighteen hundred pages, and being uncut both at top and bottom
and at the side it is peculiarly serviceable as a work of reference.
I attacked it bravely, however, hacking my way into it, paperknife
in hand. But to my dismay, the more I hacked the less could I find
of Captain Vauvenarde. I sought him in the Alphabetical Repertory of
Colonial Troops, in the list of officers _hors cadre_, in the lists
of seniority, in the list of his regiment, wherever he was likely or
unlikely to be. There is no person in the French army by the name of
Vauvenarde.

I went straight to Lola Brandt with the hideous volume and the unwelcome
news. Together we searched the pages.

“He _must_ be here,” she said, with feminine disregard of fact.

“Are you quite certain you have got the name right?” I asked.

“Why, it is my own name!”

“So it is,” said I; “I was forgetting. But how do you know he was in the
army at all?”

He might have been an adventurer, a Captain of Kopenick of the day, who
had poured a gallant but mendacious tale into her ears.

“I hardly ever saw him out of uniform. He was quartered at Marseilles on
special duty. I knew some of his brother officers.”

“Then,” said I, “there are only two alternatives. Either he has left the
army or he is----”

“Dead?” she whispered.

“Let us hope,” said I, “that he has left the army.”

“You must find out, Mr. de Gex,” she said in a low voice. “I took it for
granted that my husband was alive. It's horrible to think that he may be
dead. It alters everything, somehow. Until I know, I shall be in a state
of awful suspense. You'll make inquiries at once, won't you?”

“Did you love your husband, Madame Brandt?” I asked.

She looked at the fire for some time without replying. She stood with
one foot on the fender.

“I thought I did when I married him,” she said at last. “I thought I did
when he left me.”

“And now?”

She turned her golden eyes full on me. It is a disconcerting trick of
hers at any time, because her eyes are at once wistful and compelling;
but on this occasion it was startling. They held mine for some seconds,
and I caught in them a glimpse of the hieroglyphic of the woman's soul.
Then she turned her head slowly and looked again into the fire.

“Now?” she echoed. “Many things have happened between then and now. If
he is alive and I go to him, I'll try to think again that I love him. It
will be the only way. It will save me from playing hell with my life.”

“I am glad you see your relations to Dale in that light,” said I.

“I wasn't thinking of Dale,” she said calmly.

“Of what, then, if I may ask without impertinence?”

She broke into a laugh which ended in a sigh, and then swung her
splendid frame away from the fireplace and walked backwards and
forwards, her figure swaying and her arms flung about in unrestrained
gestures.

“You are quite right,” she said, with an odd note of hardness in her
voice. “You're quite right in what you said the other day--that it was
high time I went back to my husband. I pray God he is not dead. I have
a feeling that he isn't. He can't be. I count on you to find him and ask
him to meet me. It would be better than writing. I don't know what to
say when I have a pen in my hand. You must find him and speak to him and
send me a wire and I'll come straight away to any part of the earth. Or
would you like me to come with you and help you find him? But no; that's
idiotic. Forget that I have said it. I'm a fool. But he must be found.
He must, he must!”

She paused in her swinging about the room for which I was sorry, as her
panther-in-a-cage movements were exceedingly beautiful, and she gazed
at me with a tragic air, wringing her hands. I was puzzled to find an
adequate reason for this sudden emotional outburst. Hitherto she had
accepted the prospect of a resumption of married life with a fatalistic
calm. Now when the man is either dead or has vanished into space,
she pins all her hopes of happiness on finding him. And why had her
salvation from destruction nothing to do with Dale? There is obviously
another range of emotions at work beneath it all; but what their nature
is baffles me. Although I contemplate with equanimity my little
corner in the Garden of Prosperpine, and with indifference this common
lodging-house of earth, and although I view mundane affairs with the
same fine, calm, philosophic, satirical eye as if I were already a
disembodied spirit, yet I do not like to be baffled. It makes me angry.
But during this interview with Lola Brandt I had not time to be angry.
I am angry now. In fact I am in a condition bordering on that of a mad
dog. If Rogers came and disturbed me now, as I am writing, I would bite
him. But I will set calmly down the story of this appalling afternoon.

Lola stood before me wringing her hands.

“What are you going to do?”

“I can get an introduction to the _Chef de bureau_ of the information
department of the _Ministere de la Guerre_ in Paris,” I replied after
a moment's reflection. “He will be able to tell me whether Captain
Vauvenarde is alive or dead.”

“He is alive. He must be.”

“Very well. But I doubt whether Captain Vauvenarde keeps the office
informed of his movements.”

“But you'll go in search of him, won't you?”

“The earth is rather a large place,” I objected. “He may be in Dieppe,
or he may be on top of Mount Popocatapetl.”

“I'm sure you'll find him,” she said encouragingly.

“You'll own,” said I, “that there's something humourous in the idea
of my wandering all over the surface of the planet in search of a
lost captain of Chasseurs. It is true that we might employ a private
detective.”

“Yes!” she cried eagerly. “Why not? Then you could stay here--and I
could go on seeing you till the news came. Let us do that.”

The swiftness of her change of mood surprised me.

“What is the particular object of your going on seeing me?” I asked,
with a smile.

She turned away and shrugged her shoulders and took up her pensive
attitude by the fire.

“I have no other friend,” she said.

“There's Dale.”

“He's not the same.”

“There's Sir Joshua Oldfield.”

She shrugged her shoulders.

I lit a cigarette and sat down. There was a long silence. In some
unaccountable way she had me under her spell again. I felt a perfectly
insane dismay at the prospect of ending this queer intimacy, and I
viewed her intrigue with Dale with profound distaste. Lola had become a
habit. The chair I was sitting in was _my_ chair. Adolphus was _my_ dog.
I hated the idea of Dale making him stand up and do sentry with the fire
shovel, while Lola sprawled gracefully on the hearthrug. On the other
hand the thought of remaining in London and sharing with my young friend
the privilege of her society was intolerable.

I smoked, and, watching her bosom rise and fall as she leaned forward
with one arm on the mantelpiece, argued it out with myself, and came to
the paradoxical conclusion that I could pack her off without a pang to
Kamtchatka and the embraces of her unknown husband, but could not hand
her over to Dale without feelings of the deepest repugnance. A pretty
position to find myself in. I threw away my cigarette impatiently.

Presently she said, not stirring from her pose:

“I shall miss you terribly if you go. A man like you doesn't come
into the life of a common woman like me without”--she hesitated for a
word--“without making some impression. I can't bear to lose you.”

“I shall be very sorry to give up our pleasant comradeship,” said I,
“but even if I stay and send the private inquiry agent instead of going
myself, I shan't be able to go on seeing you in this way.”

“Why not?”

“It would be scarcely dignified.”

“On account of Dale?”

“Precisely.”

There was another pause, during which I lit another cigarette. When I
looked up I saw great tears rolling down her cheeks. A weeping woman
always makes me nervous. You never know what she is going to do next.
Safety lies in checking the tears--in administering a tonic. Still, her
wish to retain me was very touching. I rose and stood before her by the
mantelpiece.

“You can't have your pudding and eat it too,” said I.

“What do you mean?”

“You can't have Captain Vauvenarde for your husband, Dale for your
_cavaliere servente_, and myself for your guide, philosopher and friend
all at the same time.”

“Which would you advise me to give up?”

“That's obvious. Give up Dale.”

She uttered a sound midway between a sob and a laugh, and said, as it
seemed, ironically:

“Would you take his place?”

Somewhat ironically, too, I replied, “A crock, my dear lady, with one
foot in the grave has no business to put the other into the _Pays du
Tendre_.”

But all the same I had an absurd desire to take her at her word, not
for the sake of constituting myself her _amant en titre_, but so as
to dispossess the poor boy who was clamouring wildly for her among his
mother's snuffy colleagues in Berlin.

“That's another reason why I shrink from your going in search of my
husband,” she said, dabbing her eyes. “Your ill-health.”

“I shall have to go abroad out of this dreadful climate in any case.
Doctor's orders. And I might just as well travel about with an object in
view as idle in Monte Carlo or Egypt.”

“But you might die!” she cried; and her tone touched my heart.

“I've got to,” I said, as gently as I could; and the moment the words
passed my lips I regretted them.

She turned a terrified look on me and seized me by the arms.

“Is it as bad as that? Why haven't you told me?”

I lifted my arms to her shoulders and shook my head and smiled into her
eyes. They seemed true, honest eyes, with a world of pain behind them.
If I had not regarded myself as the gentleman in the Greek Tragedy
walking straight to my certain doom, and therefore holding myself aloof
from such vain things, I should have yielded to the temptation and
kissed her there and then. And then goodness knows what would have
happened.

As it was it was bad enough. For, as we stood holding on to each other's
shoulders in a ridiculous and compromising attitude, the door opened
and Dale Kynnersley burst, unannounced, into the room. He paused on the
threshold and gaped at us, open-mouthed.



CHAPTER IX

We sprang apart, for all the world like a guilty pair surprised. Luckily
the room was in its normal dim state of illumination, so that to one
suddenly entering, the expression on our faces was not clearly visible;
on the other hand, the subdued light gave a romantic setting to the
abominable situation.

Lola saved it, however. She rushed to Dale.

“Do you know what Mr. de Gex was just telling me? His illness--it is
worse than any one thought. It's incurable. He can't live long; he must
die soon. It's dreadful--dreadful! Did you know it?”

Dale looked from her to me, and after a slight pause, came forward.

“Is this true, Simon?”

A plague on the woman for catching me in the trap! Before Dale came in
I was on the point of putting an airy construction on my indiscreet
speech. I had no desire to discuss my longevity with any one. I want
to keep my miserable secret to myself. It was exasperating to have
to entrust it even to Dale. And yet, if I repudiated her implied
explanation of our apparent embrace it would have put her hopelessly in
the wrong. I had to support her.

“It's what the doctors say,” I replied, “but whether it's true or not is
another matter.”

Again he looked queerly from me to Lola and from Lola back to me. His
first impression of our attitude had been a shock from which he found it
difficult to recover. I smiled, and, although perfectly innocent, felt a
villain.

“Madame Brandt is good enough to be soft-hearted and to take a tragic
view of a most commonplace contingency.”

“But it isn't commonplace. By God, it's horrible!” cried the boy, the
arrested love for me suddenly gushing into his heart. “I had no idea of
it. In Heaven's name, Simon, why didn't you tell me? My dear old Simon.”

Tears rushed into his eyes and he gripped my hand until I winced. I put
my other hand on his shoulder and laughed with a contorted visage.

“My good Dale, the moribund are fragile.”

“Oh, Lord, man, how can you make a jest of it?”

“Would you have me drive about in a hearse, instead of a cab, by way of
preparation?”

“But what have the doctors told you?” asked Lola.

“My two dear people!” I cried, “for goodness' sake don't fall over me
in this way. I'm not going to die to-morrow unless my cook poisons me or
I'm struck by lightning. I'm going to live for a deuce of a time yet.
A couple of weeks at least. And you'll very much oblige me by not
whispering a word abroad about what you've heard this afternoon. It
would cause me infinite annoyance. And meanwhile I suggest to you,
Dale, as the lawyers say, that you have been impolite enough not to say
how-do-you-do to your hostess.”

He turned to her rather sheepishly, and apologised. My news had bowled
him over, he declared. He shook hands with her, laughed and walked
Adolphus about on his hind legs.

“But where have you dropped from?” she asked.

“Berlin. I came straight through. Didn't you get my wire?”

“No.”

“I sent one.”

“I never got it.”

He swung his arms about in a fine rage.

“If ever I get hold of that son of Satan I'll murder him. He was covered
up to his beastly eyebrows in silver lace and swords and whistles and
medals and things. He walked up and down the railway station as if he
owned the German navy and ran trains as a genteel hobby. I gave him ten
marks to send the telegram. The miserable beast has sneaked the lot.
I'll get at the railway company through the Embassy and have the brute
sacked and put in prison. Did you ever hear of such a skunk?”

“He must have thought you a very simple and charming young Englishman,”
 said I.

“You've done the same thing yourself!” he retorted indignantly.

“Pardon me,” said I. “If I do send a telegram in that loose way, I
choose a humble and honest-looking porter and give him the exact fee for
the telegram and a winning smile.”

“Rot!” said Dale, and turning to Lola--“He has demoralised the whole
railway system of Europe with his tips. I've seen him give a franc to
the black greasy devil that bangs at the carriage wheels with a bit of
iron. He would give anybody anything.”

He had recovered his boyish pride in my ridiculous idiosyncracies, and
was in process of illustrating again to Lola what a “splendid chap”
 I was. Poor lad! If he only knew what a treacherous, traitorous,
Machiavelli of a hero he had got. For the moment I suffered from a nasty
crick in the conscience.

“Wouldn't he, Adolphus, you celestial old blackguard?” he laughed. Then
suddenly: “My hat! You two are fond of darkness! It gives me the creeps.
Do you mind, Lola, if I turn on the light?”

He marched in his young way across to the switches and set the room
in the blaze he loved. My crick of the conscience was followed by an
impulse of resentment. He took it for granted that his will was law in
the house. He swaggered around the room with a proprietary air. He threw
in the casual “Lola” as if he owned her. Dale is the most delightful
specimen of the modern youth of my acquaintance. But even Dale, with
all his frank charm of manner, has the modern youth's offhand way with
women. I often wonder how women abide it. But they do, more shame to
them, and suffer more than they realise by their indulgence. When next I
meet Maisie Ellerton I will read her a wholesome lecture, for her soul's
good, on the proper treatment a self-respecting female should apply to
the modern young man.

Dale filled the room with his clear young laugh, and turned on every
light in the place. Lola and I exchanged glances--she had adopted her
usual lazy pantherine attitude in the armchair--and her glance was not
that of a happy woman to whom a longed-for lover had unexpectedly come.
Its real significance I could not divine, but it was more wistful than
merely that of a fellow-conspirator.

“By George!” cried Dale, pulling up a chair by Lola's side, and
stretching out his long, well-trousered legs in front of the fire.
“It's good to come back to civilisation and a Christian language and a
fireside--and other things,” he added, squeezing Lola's hand. “If only
it had not been for this horrible news about you, dear old man----”

“Oh, do forget it and give me a little peace!” I cried. “Why have you
come back all of a sudden?”

“The Wymington people wired for me. It seems the committee are divided
between me and Sir Gerald Macnaughton.”

“He has strong claims,” said I. “He has been Mayor of the place and got
knighted by mistake. He also gives large dinners and wears a beautiful
diamond pin.”

“I believe he goes to bed in it. Oh, he's an awful ass! It was he who
said at a public function 'The Mayor of Wymington must be like Caesar's
wife--all things to all men!' Oh, he's a colossal ass! And his conceit!
My word!”

“You needn't expatiate on it,” said I. “I who speak have suffered much
at the hands of Sir Gerald Macnaughton.”

“If he did get into Parliament he'd expect an armchair to be put for him
next to the Speaker. Really, Lola, you never saw such a chap. If there
was any one else up against me I wouldn't mind. Anyway, I'm running down
to Wymington to-morrow to interview the committee. And if they choose
me, then it'll be a case of 'Lord don't help me and don't help the b'ar,
and you'll see the derndest best b'ar fight that ever was.' I'll make
things hum in Wymington!”

He went on eagerly to explain how he would make things hum. For the
moment he had forgotten his enchantress who, understanding nothing of
platforms and planks and electioneering machinery, smiled with pensive
politeness at the fire. Here was the Dale that I knew and loved, boyish,
impetuous, slangy, enthusiastic. His dark eyes flashed, and he threw
back his head and laughed, as he enunciated his brilliant ideas for
capturing the constituency.

“When I was working for you, I made love to half the women in the place.
You never knew that, you dear old stick. Now I'm going in on my own
account I'll make love to the whole crowd. You won't mind, Lola, will
you? There's safety in numbers. And when I have made love to them one
by one I'll get 'em all together and make love to the conglomerate mass!
And then I'll rake up all the prettiest women in London and get 'em down
there to humbug the men--”

“Lady Kynnersley will doubtless be there,” said I; “and I don't quite
see her--”

He broke in with a laugh: “Oh! the mater! I'll fix up her job all right.
She'll just love it, won't she? And then I know a lot of silly asses
with motor-cars who'll come down. They can't talk for cob-nuts, and
think the Local Option has something to do with vivisection, and have a
vague idea that champagne will be cheaper if we get Tariff Reform--but
they'll make a devil of a noise at meetings and tote people round the
country in their cars holding banners with 'Vote for Kynnersley' on
them. That's a sound idea, isn't it?”

I gravely commended the statesmanlike sagacity of his plan of campaign,
and promised to write as soon as I got home to one or two members of the
committee whom I suspected of pro-Macnaughton leanings.

“I do hope they'll adopt you!” I cried fervently.

“So do I,” murmured Lola in her low notes.

“If they don't,” said Dale, “I'll ask Raggles to give me an unpaid
billet somewhere. But,” he added, with a sigh, “that will be an awful
rotten game in comparison.”

“I'm afraid you won't make Raggles hum,” said I.

He laughed, rose and straddled across the hearthrug, his back to the
fire.

“He'd throw me out if I tried, wouldn't he? But if they do adopt me--I
swear I'll make you proud of me, Simon. I'll stick my soul into it. It's
the least I can do in this horrid cuckoo sort of proceeding, and I feel
I shall be fighting for you as well as for myself. My dear old chap, you
know what I mean, don't you?”

I knew, and was touched. I wished him God-speed with all my heart.
He was a clean, honest, generous gentleman, and I admired, loved and
respected him as he stood there full of his youth and hope. I suddenly
felt quite old and withered at the root of my being, like some decrepit
king who hands his crown to the young prince. I rose to take my
leave (for what advantage was there in staying?) and felt that I was
abandoning to Dale other things beside my crown.

Lola's strong, boneless hand closed round mine in a more enveloping grip
than ever. She looked at me appealingly.

“Shall I see you again before you go?”

“Before you go?” cried Dale. “Where are you off to?”

“Somewhere south, out of the fogs.”

“When?”

“At once,” said I.

He turned to our hostess. “We can't let him go like that. I wonder if
you could fix up a little dinner here, Lola, for the three of us. It
would be ripping, so cosy, you know.”

He glowed with the preposterous inspiration. Lola began politely:

“Of course, if Mr. de Gex----”

“It would be delightful,” said I, “but I'm starting at once--to-morrow
or the day after. We will have the dinner when I come back and you are a
full-blown Member of Parliament.”

I made my escape and fled to my own cheerful library. It is oak-panelled
and furnished with old oak, and the mezzo-tints on the walls are mellow.
Of the latter, I have a good collection, among them a Prince Rupert of
which I am proud. I threw myself, a tired man, into an armchair by the
fire, and rang the bell for a brandy and soda. Oh, the comfort of the
rooms, the comfort of Rogers, the comfort of the familiar backs of the
books in the shelves! I felt loth to leave it all and go vagabonding
about the cold world on my lunatic adventure. For the first time in my
life I cursed Marcus Aurelius. I shook my fist at him as he stood on the
shelf within easy reach of my hand. It was he who had put into my head
this confounded notion of achieving eumoiriety. Am I dealing to myself,
I asked, a happy lot and portion? Certainly not, I replied, and when
Rogers brought me my brandy and soda I drank it off desperately. After
that I grew better, and drew up a merry little Commination Service.

A plague on the little pain inside.

A plague on Lady Kynnersley for weeping me into my rash undertaking.

A plague on Professor Anastasius Papadopoulos for aiding and abetting
Lady Kynnersley.

A plague on Captain Vauvenarde for running away from his wife; for
giving up the army; for not letting me know whether he is alive or dead;
for being, I'll warrant him, in the most uncomfortable and ungetatable
spot on the globe.

A plague on Dale for becoming infatuated with Lola Brandt. A plague on
him for beguiling me to her acquaintance; for bursting into the room at
that unfortunate moment; for his generous, unsuspecting love for me;
for his youth and hope and charm; for asking me to dine with Lola and
himself in ripping cosiness.

A plague on myself--just to show that I am broad-minded.

And lastly, a plague, a special plague, a veritable murrain on Lola
Brandt for complicating the splendid singleness of my purpose. I don't
know what to think of myself. I have become a common conundrum--which
provides the lowest form of intellectual amusement. It is all her fault.

Listen. I set out to free a young man of brilliant promise, at his
mother's earnest entreaty, from an entanglement with an impossible lady,
and to bring him to the feet of the most charming girl in the world who
is dying of love for him. Could intentions be simpler or more honourable
or more praiseworthy?

I find myself, after two or three weeks, the lady's warm personal
friend, to a certain extent her champion bound by a quixotic oath to
restore her husband to her arms, and regarding my poor Dale with a
feeling which is neither more nor less than green-eyed jealousy. I am
praying heaven to grant his adoption by the Wymington committee, not
because it will be the first step of the ladder of his career, but
because the work and excitement of a Parliamentary election will
prohibit overmuch lounging in _my_ chair in Lola Brandt's drawing-room.

Is there any drug I wonder which can restore a eumoirous tone to the
system?

Of course, Dale came round to my chambers in the evening and talked
about Lola and himself and me until I sent him home to bed. He kept on
repeating at intervals that I was glorious. I grew tired at last of the
eulogy, and, adopting his vernacular, declared that I should be jolly
glad to get out of this rubbishy world. He protested. There was never
such a world. It was gorgeous. What was wrong with it, anyway? As I
could not show him the Commination Service, I picked imaginary flaws in
the universe. I complained of its amateurishness of design. But Dale,
who loves fact, was not drawn into a theological disputation.

“Do you know, I had a deuce of a shock when I came into Lola's this
afternoon?” he cried irrelevantly, with a loud laugh. “I thought--it was
a damnable and idiotic thing to come into my head--but I couldn't help
thinking you had cut me out! I wanted to tell you. You must forgive me
for being such an ass. And I want to thank you for being so good to her
while I was away. She has been telling me. You like her, don't you? I
knew you would. No one can help it. Besides being other things, she's is
such a good sort, isn't she?”

I admitted her many excellencies, while he walked about the room.

“By Jove!” he cried, coming to a halt. “I've got a grand idea. My little
plan has succeeded so well with you that I've a good mind to try it on
my mother.”

“What on earth do you mean?” I asked.

“Why shouldn't I take the bull by the horns and bring my mother and Lola
together?”

I gasped. “My dear boy,” said I. “Do you want to kill me outright? I
can't stand such shocks to the imagination.”

“But it would be grand!” he exclaimed, delighted. “Why shouldn't
mother take a fancy to Lola? You can imagine her roping her in for the
committee!”

I refused to imagine it for one instant, and I had the greatest
difficulty in the world to persuade him to renounce his maniacal
project. I am going to permit no further complications.



I have been busy for the past day or two setting my house in order.
I start to-morrow for Paris. All my little affairs are comfortably
settled, and I can set out on my little trip to Avernus via Paris
and the habitat of Captain Vauvenarde with a quiet conscience. I have
allayed the anxiety of my sisters, whispered mysterious encouragement
to Maisie Ellerton, held out hopes of her son's emancipation to Lady
Kynnersley, played fairy godmother to various poor and deserving
persons, and brought myself into an enviable condition of glowing
philanthropy.

To my great relief the Wymington committee have adopted Dale as their
candidate at the by-election. He can scarcely contain himself for joy.
He is like a child who has been told that he shall be taken to the
seaside. I believe he lies awake all night thinking how he will make
things hum.

The other side have chosen Wilberforce, who unsuccessfully contested the
Ferney division of Wiltshire at the last general election. He is old and
ugly. Dale is young and beautiful. I think Dale will get in.

I have said good-bye to Lola. The astonishing woman burst into tears
and kissed my hands and said something about my being the arbiter of
her destiny--a Gallic phrase which she must have picked up from Captain
Vauvenarde. Then she buried her face in the bristling neck of Adolphus,
the Chow dog, and declared him to be her last remaining consolation.
Even Anastasius Papadopoulos had ceased to visit her. I uttered words of
comfort.

“I have left you Dale at any rate.”

She smiled enigmatically through her tears.

“I'm not ungrateful. I don't despise the crumbs.”

Which remark, now that I come to think of it, was not flattering to my
young friend.

But what is the use of thinking of it? My fire is burning low. It is
time I ended this portion of my “Rule and Example of Eumoiriety,” which,
I fear, has not followed the philosophic line I originally intended.

The die is cast. My things are packed. Rogers, who likes his British
beef and comforts, is resigned to the prospect of Continental travel,
and has gone to bed hours ago. There is no more soda water in the
siphon. I must go to bed.

Paris to-morrow.



CHAPTER X

“Ay!” says Touchstone; “now am I in Arden; the more fool I; when I was
at home I was in a better place.”

Now am I in Algiers; the more fool I; et cetera, et cetera.

It is true that from my bedroom window in the Albany I cannot see
the moon silvering the Mediterranean, or hear the soft swish of
pepper-trees; it is true that oranges and eucalyptus do not flourish
in the Albany Court-yard as they do in this hotel garden at Mustapha
Superieur; it is true that the blue African sky and sunshine are more
agreeable than Piccadilly fogs; but, after all, his own kennel is
best for a dying dog, and his own familiar surroundings best for his
declining hours. Again, Touchstone had not the faintest idea what he was
going to do in the Forest of Arden, and I was equally ignorant of what
would befall when I landed at Algiers. He was bound on a fool adventure,
and so was I. He preferred the easy way of home, and so do I. I have
always loved Touchstone, but I have never thoroughly understood him till
now.

It rained persistently in Paris. It rained as I drove from the Gare du
Nord to my hotel. It rained all night. It rained all the day I spent
there and it rained as I drove from my hotel to the Gare de Lyon.
A cheery newspaper informed me that there were torrential rains at
Marseilles. I mentioned this to Rogers, who tried to console me by
reminding me that we were only staying at Marseilles for a few hours.

“That has nothing to do with it,” said I. “At Marseilles I always eat
bouillabaisse on the quay. Fancy eating bouillabaisse in the pouring
rain!”

As usual, Rogers could not execute the imaginative exercise I
prescribed; so he strapped my hold-all with an extra jerk.

Now, when homespun London is wet and muddy, no one minds very much.
But when silken Paris lies bedraggled with rain and mud, she is the
forlornest thing under the sky. She is a hollow-eyed pale city, the
rouge is washed from her cheeks, her hair hangs dank and dishevelled,
in her aspect is desolation, and moaning is in her voice. I have a
Sultanesque feeling with regard to Paris. So long as she is amusing and
gay I love her. I adore her mirth, her chatter, her charming ways. But
when she has the toothache and snivels, she bores me to death. I lose
all interest in her. I want to clap my hands for my slaves, in order to
bid them bring me in something less dismal in the way of fair cities.

I drove to the Rue Saint-Dominique and handed in my card and letter
of introduction at the _Ministere de la Guerre_. I was received by
the official in charge of the _Bureau des Renseignements_ with bland
politeness tempered with suspicion that I might be taking a mental
photograph of the office furniture in order to betray its secret to
a foreign government. After many comings and goings of orderlies
and underlings, he told me very little in complicated and reluctant
language. Captain Vauvenarde had resigned his commission in the
Chasseurs d'Afrique two years ago. At the present moment the Bureau had
no information to give as to his domicile.

“Have you no suggestion, Monsieur, to offer?” I asked, “whereby I may
obtain this essential information concerning Captain Vauvenarde?”

“His old comrades in the regiment might know, Monsieur.”

“And the regiment?”

He opened the _Annuaire Officiel de l'Armee Francaise_, just as I might
have done myself, and said:

“There are six regiments. One is at Blidah, another at Tlemcen, another
at Constantine, another at Tunis, another at Algiers, and another at
Mascara.”

“To which regiment, then, did Captain Vauvenarde belong?” I inquired.

He referred to one of the dossiers that the orderlies had brought him.

“The 3rd, Monsieur.”

“I should get information, then, from Tlemcen?”

“Evidently, Monsieur.”

I thanked him and withdrew, to his obvious relief. Seekers after
knowledge are unpopular even in organisations so far removed from the
Circumlocution Office as the French _Ministere de la Guerre_. However,
he had put me on the trail of my man.

During my homeward drive through the rain I reflected. I might, of
course, write to the Lieutenant-Colonel of the 3rd Regiment at Tlemcen,
and wait for his reply. But even if he answered by return of post, I
should have to remain in Paris for nearly a week.

“That,” said I, wiping from my face half a teacupful of liquid mud
which had squirted in through the cab window--“that I'll never do. I'll
proceed at once to Algiers. If I can get no news of him there, I'll go
to Tlemcen myself. In all probability I shall learn that he is residing
here in Paris, a stone's throw from the Madeleine.”

So I started for Algiers. The next morning, before the sailing of the
_Marechal Bugeaud_, one of the quaint churns styled a steamship by the
vanity of the French Company which undertakes to convey respectable folk
across the Mediterranean, I ate my bouillabaisse below an awning on the
sunny quay at Marseilles. The torrential rains had ceased. I advised
Rogers to take equivalent sustenance, as no lunch is provided on day of
sailing by the Compagnie Generale Transatlantique. I caught sight of him
in a dark corner of the restaurant--he is too British to eat in the
open air on the terrace, or perhaps too modest to have his meal in
my presence--struggling grimly with a beefsteak, and, as he is a
teetotaller, with an unimaginable, horrific liquid which he poured out
from a vessel vaguely resembling a teapot.

My meal over, and having nearly an hour to spare, I paid my bill, rose
and turned the corner of the quay into the Cannebiere, thinking to have
my coffee at one of the cafes in that thoroughfare of which the natives
say that, if Paris had a Cannebiere, it would be a little Marseilles. I
suppose for the Marseillais there is a magic in the sonorous name; for,
after all, it is but a commonplace street of shops running from the
quays into the heart of the town. It is also deformed by tramcars. I
strolled leisurely up, thinking of the many swans that were geese, and
Paradises that were building-plots, and heroes that were dummies, and
solidities that were shadows, in short, enjoying a gentle post-prandial
mood, when my eyes suddenly fell on a scene which brought me down from
such realities to the realm of the fantastic. There, a few yards in
front of me, at the outer edge of the terrace of a cafe, clad in
his eternal silk hat, frock coat, and yellow gloves, sat Professor
Anastasius Papadopoulos in earnest conversation with a seedy stranger of
repellent mien. The latter was clean-shaven and had a broken nose,
and wore a little round, soft felt hat. The dwarf was facing me. As
he caught sight of me a smile of welcome overspread his Napoleonic
features. He rose, awaited my approach, and, bareheaded, made his usual
sweeping bow, which he concluded by resting his silk hat on the pit of
his stomach. I lifted my hat politely and would have passed on, but he
stood in my path. I extended my hand. He took it after the manner of a
provincial mayor receiving royalty.

“_Couvrez-vous, Monsieur, je vous en prie_,” said I.

He covered his head. “Monsieur,” said he, “I beseech you to be seated,
and do me the honour of joining me in the coffee and excellent cogna

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