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Twos and Threes

by G. B. Stern · English · Gutenberg #46049 · 676,368 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Twos and Threes

Author: G. B. Stern


        
Release date: June 20, 2014 [eBook #46049]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TWOS AND THREES ***

BY THE SAME AUTHOR


  PANTOMIME
  SEE-SAW




  TWOS AND THREES

  BY

  G. B. STERN

  London
  NISBET & CO. LTD.
  22 BERNERS STREET, W.




  _First Published in 1916_




CONTENTS


  PART I

  CHAPTER                                      PAGE

     I. “--TO BONDAGE OF GREAT DEEDS”             1
    II. A CHOICE OF HEROES                       15
   III. PLAYING AT GOD                           29
    IV. THE SHAPE OF THREE                       47
     V. DIAMONDS ARE TRUMPS                      67
    VI. MERLE                                    75
   VII. PETER                                    84
  VIII. STUART GOES A-STUNTING                   93
    IX. A PERFECT PIRATICAL PLAYROOM            104
     X. CARN TREWOOFA                           113
    XI. TWO--AND ONE OVER                       129
   XII. THE CASKET LINED WITH PINK              147


  PART II

     I. HAIRPIN VISION                          153
    II. A PRODIGAL FATHER                       162
   III. “WE TRAVEL LIGHT”                       173
    IV. WILD DUCK                               192
     V. THE WORLD WASHED CLEAN                  206
    VI. THE POINT OF VIEW OF THE ORANGE         219
   VII. FORTUNATUS                              229


  PART III

     I. “FOR HE HAD GREAT POSSESSIONS”          237
    II. FOLLOW-MY-LEADER!                       247
   III. “RUN ON BOHEMIAN LINES!”                271
    IV. IL TROVATORE                            289
     V. WORSHIPPERS ALL                         313
    VI. “TO TEST HER LOVE”                      327
   VII. JOHNSONESE                              348
  VIII. THE DISCIPLE                            363
    IX. THE MASTER                              378




TWOS AND THREES




PART I




CHAPTER I

“--TO BONDAGE OF GREAT DEEDS”


“That’s a dangerous fellow, Stuart,” remarked Baldwin Carr, who had
unperceived entered the library, and, over his nephew’s shoulder, read
the title: “Thus Spake Zarathustra.”

Stuart Heron laid down the ponderous volume of Nietzsche, and smiled up
lazily at his juvenile uncle-by-marriage: “Oh, we’re a depraved family!
Not half an hour ago I caught Babs behind the drawing-room screen,
reading Ella Wheeler Wilcox.”

Baldwin looked startled. “Isn’t that all right? I myself gave it to the
child; the complete edition, bound in white vellum.”

“We’ll send old Nietzsche to be bound in white vellum, and rob him of
his sting.”

“And this man is just as bad”; Baldwin ignored his nephew’s flippancy,
and discontentedly flicked over the pages of Bernard Shaw’s “Getting
Married,” which he had picked up from the floor beside the arm-chair.
“They’re both mad, stark staring mad, master and disciple.”

“‘Enter Nietzsche mad in white satin, Bernard Shaw mad in white
linen!’” misquoted Stuart; “yes, we must decidedly send them to the
binder’s.”

Baldwin Carr had come that evening to Carlton House Terrace, to discuss
a business problem with Stuart, who for three years had been a partner
in the firm of Heron, Heron & Carr, Diamond Merchants. But, worried
by the young man’s pernicious choice of literature, he determined to
let diamonds stand over for the moment, and, instead, make an attempt
to “talk Stuart out of Nietzsche.” In view of which intention, it
was a pity that Babs had torn from her confession album the page on
which Stuart had made shameful reply to the query: “Your Favourite
Occupation?” with: “Pulling the leg of my youngest uncle.” A glimpse
at this might have disillusioned Baldwin of his belief that, near to
Stuart in years, he was also near in understanding.

“You see, my boy,” he began now, “these clever chaps, these would-be
philosophers, they put ideas into your head.”

“Yes,” replied Stuart gently, “I think that is what they’re after, the
rogues!”

“Well, but philosophy is all very well if you don’t take it seriously;
just mug it up for Greats at Oxford, and so forth. But you seem
inclined--you mustn’t be offended, Stuart; we’re talking as man to man,
you know,--you seem inclined to apply it to everyday existence.”

“Quite.” Stuart offered the other a cigarette, and lit one himself; “I
can’t conceive of a greater insult to philosophy than to accept its
logic, and refuse its practical utility.”

“But, my dear lad, you surely wouldn’t dream of setting up Nietzsche,
of all people, as a standard for your actions. Why, if a nation did
that, we’d have the world in pieces.”

“I differ slightly from Nietzsche,” quoth Stuart Heron; “he advocates
the ruthlessness of the Overman towards the mob; I agree with the
Overman theory, but I consider that his supremest ruthlessness ought to
be directed towards himself. Nietzsche misses the value of asceticism.”

Baldwin said after a pause: “You’ll get yourself, or other people, into
a fine mess before you’ve done with all this. Why, wasn’t it something
of the kind that you were spouting when it was a question of your
career?”

Stuart laughed:

“Yes. Something of the kind....”

His uncle paced the room uneasily; he could not forget that he had
grave responsibilities of guardianship to discharge towards this young
son of Graham Heron. Graham Heron, whose death had occurred when Stuart
was a boy of fifteen, had founded the great diamond business, on
which had been built up the family’s immense fortune; had taken into
partnership his elder and younger brothers, Derwent and Arthur, not so
brilliant as himself; later, had admitted Baldwin Carr to the firm.
Graham owned a personality which established him in general regard as
head of the family, and his only son succeeded naturally to the same
central position; more especially as Derwent’s progeny were all girls,
and Arthur elected to remain a bachelor. And when school and college
reported one brilliant success after another for Graham’s son, then
Graham’s brothers and Graham’s widow foresaw a triumphant future in
whatsoever public career the lad chose to follow up. Consideration of
money there need never be; a steady flow of good luck continued to
attend the firm of Heron and Carr; it seemed that the trio of diamond
merchants could do no wrong. Stuart, struck by the Arabian-Nights’-like
quality of their glittering trade, had nicknamed them: the Khalif,
the Vizier, and the One-eyed Calendar; the last-named, unblessed by a
sense of humour, was never clear why he should thus be linked to such
eccentricities as almanacks and defective optics; but Stuart, even in
his insolent schoolboy days, went idolized and uncensured.

       *       *       *       *       *

When he finally came down from Oxford, three years previously, it was
to find his future stretching before his feet, a veritable slope of
roses. He had been reading for the Bar, and Mrs. Heron already visioned
him as the Lord Chief Justice.

“But I’m going to chuck the law,” said Stuart.

His Uncle Derwent reminded him that strings had already been pulled,
enabling him to devil for Sir Blair Tomlinson, foremost barrister of
the day; and that a more promising start could be assured to no man.

“Quite so,” Stuart agreed. And: “I’m going to chuck the law.”

The next few weeks proved but repetitions of this incident, under
various guises. Stuart had but to mention a profession--army, navy,
political, diplomatic; and Uncle Derwent or Uncle Arthur or Uncle
Baldwin was able speedily to procure such influence in that particular
quarter, as to ensure their nephew a clear path to the very summit of
ambition. And Uncle Derwent or Uncle Arthur or Uncle Baldwin had but
to mention such influence procured, and Stuart speedily abandoned all
idea of that particular career. The climax was reached when, by way of
a test, the young man averred longings for stage laurels; and Uncle
Baldwin, two evenings later, strolled into the billiard-room in Carlton
House Terrace, with the triumphant tidings that London’s leading
actor-manager, Sir Michael Forrest--“I used to know him very well”--had
avowed himself delighted to give Mr. Stuart Heron a part in the next
big autumn production, and the under-study of juvenile lead.

“I told him what they said about your Greek performance in the
O.U.D.S.,” finished Baldwin Carr.

“Exactly.” Stuart paused in the act of pocketing off the red. “And if
I wanted to be a sandwich-man, you, or one of you, would get me an
introduction to the very person who owned the identical pitch I had set
my heart on perambulating.” Changing his tactics, he pocketed the red,
viciously.

“Well, but----” Uncle Baldwin liked to be literal, “what’s that
got to do with it? You don’t want to be a sandwich-man, do you?”
apprehensively.

“As much as anything else. Why not? It’s fatal to specialize.”

Derwent Heron laid his cue in the rack. “What’s amiss, my boy? Let us
probe to the root of the matter, since we happen to be assembled in
full force. Babs, my dear,” to his flapper daughter, marking for the
players, “run away to your Aunt Elizabeth.”

Reluctantly Barbara obeyed, flinging Stuart a look of worship as she
passed: “Lord, I am here an thou wantest me!” Youngest of a quartette,
her sisters had carefully bred her in the Heron traditions.

He caught at her long russet plait: “Between ourselves, Babs,” in a
whisper; “how much unearned increment have you been placing to my
account?”

She flushed crimson: “Oh, Stuart, it isn’t cheating, is it? when it’s
not for oneself.”

“I’ll consider the plea. How much?”

“Only ... seven.”

He laughed and released her. Then, strolling to the board, slid back
his disc the requisite number. “Even in this,” he muttered.

“Out with it, Stuart,” from Uncle Arthur, erect on the hearthrug.

Arthur Heron, junior to the late Graham Heron, remained something of
an enigma to the world at large, inasmuch as he very rarely spoke, but
preferred to stand with his back to fireplaces; his head a little on
one side, after the fashion of a benign canary; a huge cigar cocked
from the left-hand corner of his mouth. When he occasionally did give
vent to speech, his voice crackled thinly, like charred paper raked
from the grate, so that strangers unfairly suspected him of laughing at
them. In appearance he resembled a small-sized orange-pip that had lain
too long in the sun, and burnt red instead of yellow.

Derwent Heron, eldest of three brothers, was best summed up by the
adjective “elaborate.” Perhaps to that, one might add “punctilious.”
His speech was elaborate, and so was his neck-gear; and he was
punctilious in his appointments, and in his manners, and the discharge
of obligations. His tastes were certainly elaborate, particularly in
entrées. Born punctiliously, he would probably die elaborately. He
was a fine-looking old gentleman, upright, white-haired, kind-eyed;
distinctive by the small pointed imperial he elected to wear.

Remained Uncle Baldwin, who actually and in point of birth was not a
Heron at all, and therefore far more Heron than the Herons ever aspired
to be. He had, indeed, been continually obliged to remind them of their
Herondom and all it entailed, since nine years before, he had entered
the family by his marriage with Eunice, only sister of Derwent, Graham
and Arthur, and very much their junior.

Eunice had died eleven months after; thus forming so slight a link
between her husband and the Herons, that the latter family were left
vaguely wondering how they had come to be nourishing in their bosom
this well-bred personage with instincts as sleek and groomed as his own
head; in short, how he had happened!

Baldwin dwelt at Sonning; hibernated from September to May; and during
the summer months found his vocation in following up river regattas
in the umpire’s boat; whence, with the aid of field-glasses, he
adjudicated in a fashion sufficiently impartial to fill Pallas herself
with envy. He felt occasional qualms of uneasiness respecting his young
nephew’s ability to keep intact the prestige of the name. Deep down
in the heart of Baldwin may have lain buried a conviction that safer
on his head than on Stuart’s would have been poised the Heron crown;
deeper still, perhaps, the unacknowledged and pardonable longing once
and for all to kick the cub and put him in his proper place. But all of
this, Baldwin was well aware, must be loyally suppressed.

“It seems to me, Stuart,” he remarked, wounded at the reception of his
intercession with Sir Michael Forrest, “that you have some ambition of
which you haven’t told us. If you were to own up, we would naturally
give you all the assistance in our power.”

“I know you would,” Stuart interrupted, frowning heavily in the
endeavour to express his meaning. “And that’s just it. You’ve got too
much assistance in your power. I want to achieve--and you bring me the
achievement upon a golden salver. Whatever I mention, it’s the same
thing; influence, money, friends--and I’m lifted over all the rough
places and deposited on the very summit of desire. What’s left to me
after that? Khalif, what’s left?”

Derwent Heron made no reply to this direct appeal. He was looking over
the double-sliding doors, at an arresting portrait of his brother
Graham, to whom he owed everything; and who, strangely enough, had been
wont to hold forth in just such an incomprehensible fashion. Was it not
his, Derwent’s, business to do all he could for the advancement and
prosperity of Graham’s son? unheeding any freaks and phases which the
lad might have brought along from Oxford. He wished Arthur would speak.
But then, Arthur never spoke. That came from being a bachelor, Derwent
reflected unreasonably.

“Well,” suggested Baldwin, filling up the pause, “if you’re really
keen on adventure, hardship, the philosophic-tramp business which is
now the fashionable cult, there’s no harm that I can see if you roughed
it for a year or two.”

--“Dressed in a suit of rags from Clarkson’s, along Broad Highways
carefully laid with red carpet?” Stuart grinned. For a moment the
leprechaun spirit bade him give up the attempt to lay bare the twists
and turns of his mental asceticism; and instead, draw exquisite
enjoyment from Baldwin’s conception of a Walt Whitman-esque existence.
Then the metaphysician rejected this outlet as cheap and easy;
argued that there must be means whereby three grown men of moderate
intellect could be convinced of anything, if sufficient trouble be
taken. The metaphysician was always inclined to be very severe with
the leprechaun; but in this case the leprechaun had the last word,
whispering that it would be a glorious stunt if Khalif, Vizier and
One-eyed Calendar, could indeed be forced to understanding by dint of
sheer brilliant reasoning. And since Stuart was above all things a
Stuntorian, he forthwith tackled the task.

“Read Kipling, any of you?”

They had all read Kipling. That is to say, Uncle Arthur had chuckled in
secret over “Stalky and Co.”; Uncle Derwent had seen and appreciated
Forbes Robertson in the “Light that Failed,” and Uncle Baldwin
remembered, at the time of the Boer war, giving a guinea to a pretty
girl who had declaimed the “Absent-minded Beggar.”

“D’you know ‘Diego Valdez’? It’s in the ‘Five Nations.’”

“No,” from Derwent and Arthur. Baldwin, idly chalking cues for want of
better employment, said that he might recognize it if he heard it.

Without preamble or apology, Stuart abruptly flung at them the bitter
complaint of the Spanish Admiral:

    “The God of fair beginnings
    Hath prospered here my hand ...”

--Fair beginnings, indeed, for the son of the house of Heron. The
oak-panelled walls, the expensive full-sized billiard-table, the scent
of good cigars, the attentive faces of his three listeners, all seemed
to shout this fact aloud.

    “To me my king’s much honour,
    To me my people’s love----”

The folding-doors slid open, admitting Mrs. Heron and Babs. Baldwin
raised a quick hand of warning:

“Hush. Don’t make a noise. Stuart’s reciting.”

“Damn it, Baldwin!” roared his nephew; “do you take this for a board
school prize-giving?”

Softly Mrs. Heron withdrew, gliding the doors behind her, with infinite
precautions not to jar them in the contact.

Stuart went on; bent slightly forward from his careless seat on the
edge of the billiard-table; hands clasped between his knees; the
green-shaded quadrangle of strong lights just above, biting out his
features with uncompromising clarity. His tones were low and tight with
the infinity of pain that underlay the next verses: Valdez recalling
his old adventure days, when unknown, unfettered, he sailed in happy
comradeship on the South Seas:

    “I dreamt to wait my pleasure
    Unchanged my Spring would bide;
    Wherefore, to wait my pleasure,
    I put my Spring aside.
    Till first in face of fortune,
    And last in mazed disdain,
    I made Diego Valdez
    High Admiral of Spain.”

And a faint mockery twitched the young man’s lips, as if drawing some
secret analogy with the curse of good fortune following the Spaniard’s
every movement.

    “Then walked no wind ’neath Heaven
    Nor surge that did not aid----”

Baldwin flicked a fine powder of chalk from his coat-sleeve, and fixed
Stuart with the super-concentrated glare of one whose attention has
wandered. It was difficult to tell what was the effect of the poem on
the other two men, standing with faces in deepest shadow, well above
the zone of illumination.

    “They wrought a deeper treason,
    Led seas that served my needs;
    They sold Diego Valdez
    To bondage of great deeds.”

By a curious power he possessed of projection into the future, Stuart
was able to glimpse himself, victim of a self-made great career,
striving passionately to escape its easeful heaviness; regain the
careless freedom, the stimulating longings of non-achievement. And
he saw, too, with unerring clarity, how, step by step, he, even he,
another Diego Valdez, might be spurred by inspiring eloquence, noble
example, to such inevitable bondage.

    “His will can loose ten thousand,
    To seek their loves again--
    But not Diego Valdez
    High Admiral of Spain!”

Baldwin thought, relieved, that the ensuing pause marked the signal for
opinions to be delivered:

“I must say, I don’t see that the fellow, Diego What’s-his-name, had
much to grumble at.”

Stuart looked towards Derwent, who said, rather elaborately:

“It seems to me, my dear boy, that I detect an inconsistency, if I
may be permitted to make the remark. With one breath you assure us
that you desire to fight your battles without assistance to detract
from the joy of victory; while in the verses you so--er--ah, yes, so
effectively repeated, I take it that you were voicing a distaste for
the responsibilities of high office consequent on victory?”

“It does sound as if there were a flaw,” Stuart admitted, overjoyed at
having evoked a point sufficiently strong to put him on the defensive:
“You might reconcile it this way, Khalif: I want to do; I don’t want to
become.”

Derwent enquired: “Then what are your plans? It strikes me as somewhat
preposterous that you should be let work out your destiny from the very
bottom of the ladder, like so many millions who have no alternative.”

“It wouldn’t do, either.” Stuart sprang from the table; and hands
plunged deep in his pockets, head bent, paced moodily the length of
the room. “Without the actual necessity, that would simply label me
as a freak: the eccentric young millionaire who elects to work with
the masses. However far I wrenched myself from your powerful wealth
and influence, the mere fact of it would still prevent my struggles
from being genuine. They’d be theatrical, neither more nor less. I’m
damnably placed, Khalif,--and I want to be a Commissioner of Oaths!”

This last for Baldwin’s benefit, remarking with concern that his
youngest uncle’s immaculately trousered leg had remained for a full
twenty minutes unpulled.

“A--what?” Baldwin responded instantly. “Really, Stuart!”

“I’ve never been told the exact duties of a Commissioner of Oaths, but
the title is alluring in its possibilities, in the red robust rakish
twang of it. Think of being forever surrounded by an atmosphere of
oaths; thundering oaths, villainous oaths, subtle sanguinary oaths,”
Stuart raised eyes of sky-exalted innocence to meet Baldwin’s uneasy
glare. “Hellish oaths,” he finished, gently as a child.

“Really, Stuart----” Mr. Carr had much to do to remember his
allegiance. And Derwent Heron, noting signs of disturbance, hastily
broke in with the subject of his meditations, before it was as ripe as
he could have wished it.

“If you will permit me,” without which preamble he rarely opened
speech, “I have a suggestion to offer; one which I never before
submitted to you, my boy, as I assumed you were set on gaining laurels
in some profession. Your many triumphs at Oxford accounting for this
mistake on my part. Since it is not to be, how do you view the idea
of a partnership in the business?” Impressive pause. And then the old
man resumed in faintly ironic voice: “It would give you plenty to
do, nothing to become,--unless it be Lord Mayor of London. And that
evil can be circumvented with a little discretion and a sufficient
stinginess on charity lists.”

A flicker of surprised amusement in Stuart’s eyes. “A diamond
merchant,” he murmured, ... “why not? Khalif, Vizier and One-eyed
Calendar--and now behold Camaralzaman! A bit fantastic, that’s all
there is against it.”

Derwent heard. “If I may venture to prognosticate, you won’t find much
that is fantastic about the offices in Holborn. However, you needn’t
decide all at once; think the matter over. I need hardly say,” with a
glance that gathered in his partners, “that your father’s son will be
more than welcome; though I, for one, am disappointed, yes, certainly
disappointed, that you have renounced burdens of a more glorious
nature.”

“After all,” quoth Baldwin, “if we all shirked responsibility in that
fashion, where would the world be?”

To which Arthur Heron, speaking for the first time: “To every Admiral
his Spain. Baldwin’s thinking of the regatta season.”

“Uncle Arthur,” Stuart cried exuberantly, “your scalp at least is mine,
to nail at my belt!” with which expression of gratitude to the sole
convert of his evening’s eloquence, he crashed asunder the doors, and
made an effective exit.

       *       *       *       *       *

Baldwin was thinking of this scene, in the silence following his
vain effort to turn Stuart from a discipleship of Nietzsche. From
recognition of the fact that, in spite of philosophy, his nephew
had not, after all, made such a bad diamond merchant, he suddenly
remembered the object of his visit that evening:

“Look here, Stuart, what do you think of this Antoine Gobert business?”

“I think Antoine Gobert is a clever fraud.”

“Sir Fergus Macpherson seems inclined to believe there may be something
in it.”

“What--that this fellow can actually manufacture diamonds
indistinguishable from the real stone?”

“He thinks there may be something in it.”

“A Scotchman has no right to believe in miracles,” said Stuart
carelessly; but a hard line had crept between his eyes; he had been
buying stock heavily of late; and if this upstart foreigner should
prove after all to be genuine in his avowals--

“Derwent spoke to Grey, and to Rupert Rosenstein. There seems to be an
idea of paying Gobert a lump sum to keep him quiet, and then finance
his experiments.”

“Experiments! I tell you, Baldwin, the man’s a swindler.”

“Swindler or not, there’ll be a big drop in the market if rumours get
about.”

“We can hold on.”

Baldwin Carr looked doubtful, as he rose to go:

“I’m dining with Derwent, and I’ll tell him what you say, but....”

Stuart accompanied him downstairs. The dinner-gong was drowning the
house in sound, and the postman had just thundered at the door. The
butler stepped forward with a letter on a salver. When Baldwin had
gone, Stuart slit the envelope, and drew forth a dance invitation:

“‘Madame Marcel des Essarts’--Mother, who’s Madame Marcel des Essarts?”
as Mrs. Heron, on the arm of her brother-in-law, Arthur Heron, came out
of the drawing-room.

“Oh, don’t you remember, Stuart? She used to visit me quite often when
you were a schoolboy; a white-haired aristocratic old lady. And once or
twice she brought her little granddaughter; such a pretty child, and so
beautifully dressed, like a French doll, black hair and red lips and a
waxen face----”

“And she wasn’t allowed to play with the tortoise for fear it should
get ferocious and spring at her! Yes, I remember. She’s evidently
sufficiently grown-up for the ball-room now.”

“Merle des Essarts must be about twenty,” remarked Mrs. Heron, helping
herself to olives; “she has been abroad a great deal, I believe. If she
is half as lovely as she promised to be, she ought to make a brilliant
match.”

Stuart smiled.

“What do you think of our wizard in diamonds, Arthur?”




CHAPTER II

A CHOICE OF HEROES


The same evening, two girls were huddled in a doorway of His Majesty’s
Theatre. They had drifted with the crowd down the stone steps leading
from the Upper Circle, their brains struggling to return to reality
from the world-that-is-not. Then a voice pierced bewilderment with the
exclamation: “Why, it’s raining!” and they emerged on to an unfamiliar
back street, pavements dark mirrors of glistening wet, something
sinister about the hovering gnome-like figures who sprang alive at
their elbows, offering in hoarse voices to fetch a vehicle. And then
umbrellas began to slide up before their owners had even quitted the
shelter of the outjutting porch; umbrellas with nasty vindictive
spikes. Other people rolled away in landaulettes and taxi-cabs. It was
essentially one of those occasions which cry out for the luxury of male
protection; for the authoritative voice to say: “stay where you are
for the moment, while I look for the car.” Then the beckoning summons,
the dash to the kerbstone, an address given, a door slammed, the swift
easy glide up the street: “Now we’re all right,” remarks the protective
male, as he adjusts rug and window; “beastly night....”

Which is why Peter remarked suddenly, as they waited for one of the
shadow-shapes to be faithful to the trust reposed in him: “We shall
have to admit a man, Merle, because of the taxis. It’s all right to be
a shivering outcast when you get home and think about it. It’s the
present part of the business I object to. What on earth possessed your
grandmother to want the use of her own carriage to-night?”

“It’s the birthday of an Ambassador,” Merle explained apologetically;
“and she so hates going in four-wheelers.”

The crowd was thinning. Presently they would be the only two remaining
in the doorway.

“It will be awful to be quite the last of all,” the elder girl went on
apprehensively. “They won’t let us sleep in the theatre, I’m sure; not
after the opera-glasses have been put away. And the backs of theatres
aren’t in London at all; they’re in a horrible phantom neighbourhood of
their own.”

--“’Ere y’are, lidies!” Their wheeled deliverance was at hand.

Peter was spending the night with Merle. She always appreciated the
moment, when, softly closing behind them the door of the house in
Lancaster Gate, she attended to the bolts and locks, while Merle
pierced the rich blackness with the rays of a small electric lantern,
which was to guide them burglariously up the thickly carpeted stairs.
It was good, remembering their shivering moments in No-Man’s-Land, now
to sprawl in luxury across the brocaded bed-cover, and watch Merle
submit to the ministrations of the elderly French bonne, who maided
Mademoiselle, and also had a great deal to say as to what was _comme il
faut_ for the latter’s general deportment.

“Bonsoir, Nicole. Et merci bien.”

“’Soir, Mesdemoiselles. And do not stay too long chattering; it is not
good for the complexion.” Nicole retired.

“Good Heavens!” ejaculated Peter; “that I should live to own a friend
who owns a maid. A maid _and_ a dressing-gown. Can’t you do something
about it? You know, it’s quite easy to pull off your own stockings,
once you’ve learnt how.”

“Have you brought a comb this time?” Merle enquired with dangerous
politeness.

“No, I haven’t. ’Cos why? ’Cos mine has only seven teeth left in its
head, and I daren’t expose its nakedness to the eye of Nicole, since
she _will_ lay out the contents of my suit-case on the bed, as they do
for the Lady Alice in novelette society house-parties.”

She brushed fiercely at her tangle of curling fair hair, that was not
long enough for the need of hairpins, nor short enough to lie smooth to
her head.

“About the comb,” she continued; “I always say: ‘don’t tell me they’ve
forgotten to put it in again! That comes of letting Amy pack for
me’--or Bertha or Marion or Pussy, or any other imaginary small sister
I haven’t got. It quite deceives Nicole; she sympathises, lends me your
second-best, and I daresay wonders at the multiplicity of my mother’s
offspring.”

Merle laughed, and turning out the electric lights cunningly fitted
into the three-tiered gilt candelabra, switched on instead the tiny red
lamp which stood beside her Second Empire bedstead.

“_Voilà!_ The appropriate lighting for the traditional
girlish-chatter-while-they-brush-their-hair. Are you serious in
proposing to admit a man to our duet?”

“Quite, if we can find one to suit. I want to try a trio; it might be
interesting.”

“It might be dangerous,” Merle supplemented. She sat on the edge of
the bed, hands clasped about her knees, the tapestried canopy casting
a deep shadow on her delicately-cut features, flawless as a profile
on a cameo, colourless as ivory. Something of the French château yet
lurked in her quaintly courteous manners; something of the French
convent in the soft voice, in the heavy eyelids swift to drop as an
overweary flower. The des Essarts were of pure Gallic stock, though
their devotion to the Royalist cause had half a century before caused
them to seek a permanent dwelling in England. But Peter declared that
Merle still carried about with her a permanent aura of white lilies
in a cloister garden; that she should by rights always be clad in an
Empire satin frock, high under the arms; and that if she followed her
natural instincts, she would never enter or quit a room without a deep
reverence.

She was certainly “of a loveliness,” as Nicole was wont to declare,
morning and evening, like a Benediction.

“It might be dangerous,” Merle repeated thoughtfully.

“You mean, if one of us fell in love with him?”

“Or both.”

“‘The Man Who Came Between Them,’ or ‘The Eternal Triangle,’ 419th time
of representation!” Peter flung round to face her companion, hands
dramatically clutching at the toilet-table behind her.

“So, after all we’ve been to each other,” she declaimed, a long pause
between each spitten word, “to let a man rupture our friendship!”

Merle took her cue instantly. She was accustomed to playing her part in
whatever impromptu scene their conversation might evoke.

“We were fools,” bitter mockery curling her pretty lips; “if we hadn’t
known beforehand--but we knew--we courted the danger. And it has worked
itself out in the old old way.”

Peter crossed to the window, her back to the room, one hand holding
back the velvet hangings, as she brooded out into the black dripping
night.

“A man and two girls. What else could we expect? We’re only human
beings, tho’ we did occasionally rise to immortality on the wings of
swank.”

With an effort Merle retained her gravity: “Can’t we throw him out even
now?” she pleaded.

But without turning, the other shook her head. “There would be a
difference. Something smashed. It never looks the same after mending.
And besides ... we’d miss the excitement.... Ner-no, Merle! once one
admits the question of sex----”

“It’s ... rather a pity, though. Do you remember----” Merle broke
off. In her voice lingered wistful regrets for the one-time careless
happiness they themselves had set out to destroy. “I can’t make out,”
she questioned, groping hopelessly, “when it all started, where, why.
How we could have allowed it to go so far. If we hadn’t both clung to
the pretence that nothing was wrong, we might have stopped it.”

And the harsh reply, so unlike Peter’s usual buoyant tones:

“Stopped his love of you, or my love for him,--which?”

Merle permitted herself an aside: “Oh, it’s to be that way, is it?”

“I think so,” and Peter also slipped for a moment out of the circle of
limelight. “You, being the Beautiful One, are sure to come in an easy
first. And I’d rather play the Unwanted Woman; it affords more scope
for my histrionic abilities,” in proof of which, she continued her rôle
in such a natural manner that Merle was not sure or not if the tragedy
had been indeed resumed.

“I’m going. There’s no sense in dragging this on indefinitely. I shall
want to come back and talk about it when I get to the foot of the
stairs. It’ll be funny ...” a half-laugh here that might have been a
sob, “funny to think of never coming back. We’ve rehearsed this sort of
good-bye so often in jest--haven’t we?”

At which Merle flung herself back among the pillows, both hands pressed
tightly to her forehead.

“Pax, Peter! pax! I give it up. You’ve twisted up a rehearsal inside a
rehearsal, and I don’t know any more if I’m real. Peter, I give it up.”

Peter laughed; and returning from her bowed passage to the door, leapt
on to the foot of the bed, drawing up both her legs beneath her,
Turkish fashion.

“Now we can’t really quarrel, man or no man. This scene will act as
a lightning-conductor, catch it on its way and render it harmless.
Besides, anyhow we could never quarrel, because of your grandmother,
not to mention my aunt; you know we would hear nothing but: ‘You never
ask that charming Peter Kyndersley to tea, _chérie_, and you were once
so fond of her’; and ‘There was a time when Merle des Essarts couldn’t
be here enough’ (sniff), ‘I suppose you’ve had a tiff with her!’ A
simply unbearable situation; in sheer self-defence we should have to
combine forces again.”

Peter looked about her for a cigarette; then, remembering where she
was, abandoned the search, and gave her whole attention to the subject
in hand:

“To return to the man----”

“Is he to bring any qualifications besides a magnetic attraction for
taxis?”

“Waiters,” promptly. “Knowledge of the exact shade of tone in which to
address a waiter; neither jocose, nor frigid, nor yet deprecating.”

“Then suppose you station yourself near the buffet at our dance; and
listen carefully to the demands for claret-cup.”

“Your dance!” snatching at the words; “Merle, you’ve hit on the exact
setting for the introduction of our Extra Element of Excitement. When
is it?”

“Next month. The invitations went out this morning.”

“And who’s coming? Men, I mean.”

“A hundred and twenty-two in all,” Merle murmured; “do you want their
names? I’m sleepy.”

“Don’t be sleepy, then, while I’m playing at the Fates, and Destiny,
and the Will of Heaven, all in one.” She reached out to the escritoire,
and grabbed pencil and paper. “I’m going to make a catalogue; fire
away! You know these hundred and odd males; I don’t. Fling me the most
likely ones, and I’ll run them through an informal examination. Such
as: ‘will you play Pirates nicely?’ ‘do you mind damp socks?’ ‘can you
talk nonsense earnestly, and of earnest matters nonsensically?’ Above
all, ‘do you feel equal to the manipulation of a trio?’”

“I shall enjoy watching from afar the face of your partner, while you
treat him to all that. Put down Justin Carruthers, for a start.”

Peter scribbled the name: “Special distinguishing marks?”

“Black waistcoat where other people elect to wear white, and a tendency
to serious intentions. Logan Thane owns a country-seat with grapes and
antlers, and will, if properly trained, stand up by a mantelpiece and
slash with his riding-whip. Bertie Milligan, youthful and intense,
now in the clutches of a designing female; the Oxford voice--and can
use it to imitate ducklings. Grey Rubinstein, fat, and the son of a
judge--but with possibilities of humour. Armand Drelincourt has just
bought another motor-car. Always. And will tell you about his fatal
temperament. Roy Clarke, a due sense of his own importance, and could
be brought to develop a sense of ours; one-steps like seven devils.
Mark St. Quentin----” Merle broke off the catalogue with a laugh; “you
know Mark; he was the means of bringing us together; I don’t think
we’ll place another responsibility upon his soul. José di Gasparis
vibrates like a cinema when he dances; and the blacking of his shoes
will come off on your satin ones. Won’t that do? I can’t think of any
more.”

Peter had been scribbling furiously. She glanced with critical eye down
the list.

“I’ll bring this with me on the 18th, though I can’t say the material
is promising. I like Logan Thane best.” She mused awhile over the
names. “Yes, Merle, I think it will be Logan Thane.”

But Merle’s straight black lashes already shadowed her cheeks. She was,
if anything, lovelier asleep than awake. Peter glanced at her with a
certain whimsical tenderness--then crept in beside her, and switched
off the crimson light.

“We do need the taxi-man,” was her last coherent thought; “she more
than I. She’s more feminine. Or at least, she’s somehow allowed to show
more feminine.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Pepita Kyndersley lived with an aunt at Thatch Lane, some half
an hour’s distance by rail from London. Her mother was dead. Her
father, responsible for her name, a tenor ballad-singer; sometimes
in evening-dress, at a private entertainment; oftener in a red
hunting-coat with gilt buttons, at a pier concert. At all times, a
disreputable but attractive personage, never to be mentioned by Peter’s
aunt; treated by Peter herself, when she chanced to meet him twice or
thrice in the year, with good-humoured and tolerant amusement, as from
one man to another. Nor would she have found objection in attaching
herself permanently to the “Idol of all the Capitals of Europe,” as the
leaflets were wont to declare him after a tour of the watering-places
between Margate and Beachy Head; such an erratic existence was not
without its charms; but the Idol shook his head at her suggestion:

“I would not have the bloom brushed from your girlhood, my Pepita,”
tenderly.

Peter laughed: “The ladies who find your voice so full of tears and
your hair so full of wave, would lose some of their enthusiasm if they
saw you forever accompanied by a grown-up daughter. Is that it?”

Bertram Kyndersley deprecated; met the said daughter’s eye--and slowly
winked his own; an inexcusable loss of moral equilibrium, atoned for
by the rich sobriety of his next remark:

“You are a great comfort to me, my little girl. Your poor mother said
you would be a comfort to me,” for by this manner of speech did he
seek reminder of his surprising parenthood, a factor he was otherwise
liable to forget, but to which he fondly clung for the sake of its
unanswerable link with respectability. Then he borrowed her quarterly
dress allowance, and went with it a-wooing.

So Peter dwelt with her mother’s elder sister at Thatch Lane. That
is to say, they had bedrooms in the same house, and took their meals
together. But Miss Esther Worthing’s universe consisted of herself,
wearing a high linen collar and carrying an umbrella; surrounded by
houses containing each a county family--particular county a matter of
indifference; surrounded in turn by churches--orthodox, of course;
English public schools, mostly Eton; the whole encircled by a high
wall, beyond which dwelt foreigners, Jews, artists, and suchlike. Peter
being distinctly suchlike, knew herself well beyond the wall, and was
quite content to abide there. Occasionally she made concessions to her
aunt by allowing herself to be exploited in county circles; county in
this case consisting of Thatch Lane. She had exhausted the resources of
Thatch Lane practically at the outset; wrung from the place and people
all they contained of stimulation; zigzagged like a streak of lightning
through the lives of the young men of the neighbourhood, finished them
off before they were well aware of being started; remaining still avid
for something that could wear out her marvellous brain and superb body;
tear from her that bright defiant liberty she claimed as her chief
right; someone who could tire her ... tire her? at times she felt more
weariness for lack of battle than defeat could ever have brought in its
train.

Particular occupation she had none; but took her days unlinked, in
something of the true vagabond spirit, each one for what it would
bring her. Days that began with dawn and ended with darkness, and
naught of connection between darkness and dawn. Neither did she own a
knit coterie of friends; but had picked up a random assortment, and
darted in and out of their separate spheres of life, as the need or the
careless fancy took her. So that there was a certain lack of rhythmic
swing, of cohesion, in her twenty-three years, till she met Merle des
Essarts.

They flashed together at a charity subscription dance in the
Assembly Hall at Thatch Lane. Merle had been motored thither by some
acquaintances, forced into an extensive purchase of tickets. Peter was
on the committee; and had donned for the evening an appropriate voice
and expression. For she took pride in her powers of outward adjustment
to whatever part she was called upon to play, while able to regard her
motley the while with amused and appreciative detachment.

They happened with their respective partners at the same supper-table.

Merle’s partner cut his thumb.

“I wonder if I ought to bind it up.”

“I shouldn’t like blood-poisoning to set in.”

“It’s not worth making a fuss. I hate making a fuss.”

“I’m not saying much about it, but as a matter of fact, I’m in
considerable pain.”

“Look, Miss des Essarts!”

Merle did not want to look, but the thumb of Mark St. Quentin was
thrust upon her.

“It is bad, isn’t it?” courteously.

Presently she was invited to look again; and again she took an
intelligent interest. It was just sufficiently bad to spoil her entrée.

“I’m not saying much about it----”

“Let me tie it up for you,” quoth Peter suddenly, noting the other
girl’s lack of appetite.

Peter produced a dainty square of lawn and lace. Peter bent her boyish
halo of hair in deep absorption over the injured member. And both her
own partner and the victim supplied all the obvious patter about the
“healing touch,” and “it was worth while to have suffered,” and “some
people have all the luck,” and (of course) “will you let me keep the
handkerchief?”--unutterable meanings in the request.

“‘When pain and anguish wring the brow,’” Merle murmured to her plate,
as a very flushed ministering angel raised her head from the act of
mercy.

Peter tossed her a look of indignation, and afterwards waylaid her in
the corridor:

“See here,” hotly, “I don’t know who you are, but I made an ass of
myself so that you should enjoy your sweetbreads, and then you rag me
about it!”

“I’m sorry,” Merle replied, very penitent. “And I am grateful to you,
really. But you didn’t see his ecstatic expression while you bound up
the wound. Please forgive me--and let me replace the handkerchief.”

Peter liked this girl with the curious foreign lilt in her accent, and
the demure sense of humour. And when a few days later a half-dozen
of finely embroidered handkerchiefs arrived, together with a formal
invitation to take tea with the sender, she went with a foreknowledge
of having at last discovered someone who could speak her peculiarly
twisted language.

She found a French bonbon in an exquisite bonbonnière; she found
a jewel in its pink-lined casket; she found a dainty little lady,
guarded and cherished as is only a “jeune fille” of French extraction;
exquisitely dressed; very much in the picture, whether in the
Louis-Seize drawing-room, or the Empire boudoir, or on the front seat
of her grandmother’s roomy and old-fashioned barouche. And buried deep
beneath these ornamentations, she found more of herself than she ever
thought to encounter in a fellow-being. So much of herself, that it was
almost a shock to vanity.

They did not become Best Friends in the sense of choosing each other’s
hats, and walking with interlaced arms. They walked instead with
interlaced lives. And from a series of vivid and incongruous patches,
Peter now saw it possible to weave the pattern of her existence and
Merle’s, so that the minutes were linked to the hours, and the seasons
pursued one another the round of the calendar, and every haphazard
personage was given a meaning, and every group of persons. And they
planned undertakings and carried them through always; and robbed
fiction of adventure, to place that wild-haired lass in the setting of
things-that-happen. Journeys did they plot, preceded by an elaborate
structure of deception for the benefit of Miss Esther Worthing, and
an entirely different édition de luxe to satisfy Madame des Essarts;
thus necessitating great play for the exercise of their ingenuity.
If one mood led them to revel in utterly childish delights, such as
raising the golden-syrup spoon high above the plate, so as to let the
shining liquid drop in coils and patterns upon the bread, a swift
change of circumstances showed the twain in ultra-luxurious furs and
ultra-spotless white kid gloves, setting forth solemnly, and with the
moral support of a card-case, to “pay calls.” They arranged imaginary
“parties,” one for the other; of which Merle’s favourite showed stately
Madame des Essarts playing a prominent part with Bertram Kyndersley
of the Melting Eye; though Peter inclined more to a fanciful alliance
she had promoted between the Sphinx and the Albert Memorial--with dire
results to the white flower of a blameless statue’s life.

Merle caught Peter’s infectious trick of light brilliant patter-talk,
so that the likeness between the twain was marvellous to those who
could not pierce beneath exterior resemblances. It was Peter who
invariably started the vein of nonsense, Merle who capped it at the
finish. Merle did not breathe the atmosphere as a matter of course; she
had too long been nourished in hot-house solemnity, and her witticisms
tumbled out with a surprised little lift in the voice, as if in
astonishment at their escape from bondage. Nor could she ever learn
sublime disregard of the feelings and conveniences of others, but would
linger to propitiate the breathless fragments scattered by the swift
onrush of Peter’s imperial passage; continued, in spite of her friend’s
laughing remonstrances, to pay reverential homage to white hairs, and
display a certain polite hauteur where persons of inferior station were
in question. One jested, yes,--_mais pas avec les autres_! “You deserve
to die on the guillotine,” quoth Peter.

But she gave in, notwithstanding her leadership, before the chill
of Merle’s little reserves. For--and here lay the sting of the
matter--instinct would not lead her exactly to where these reserves lay
hidden; she would stumble on them unawares, without the remotest notion
for what reason just that particular mention or sally or point of view,
should call forth in the other a mood resembling cold water, finely
sprayed. Merle herself, thus argued Peter, could on occasions be as
daringly demurely blasphemous, so why....

But Peter knew well enough that the careless years she had spent
knocking about with her parents and their shoddy coarse-grained
good-natured associates, had done their destroying work. It is
always absurd to suppose, in the popular fashion, that whatever a
girl’s surroundings, her outlook can remain pure and flower-like and
uncontaminated. Certain words had to be checked on her tongue; the
itch for a cigarette was ever in her fingers; she was familiar with
what she termed the “man-look,” and recognized too soon the dawning
of intentions that needed to be checked. Other traces there were:
a cool disregard as to the state of undress in which circumstances
might chance to discover her straight young limbs; meanings of the
under-world that attached themselves to perfectly innocent phrases.
Not a very profound under-world; just below the glazed surface. And
experiences had been hers, squalid enough to give pleasure in the
recollection, when balancing a fragile teacup at some opulent afternoon
reception.

These after-effects could hardly be considered serious; merely annoying
to have perceptions so far blunted as to give no warning on the rare
occasions when Merle’s greater fineness was in danger. “I would not
have the bloom brushed from your girlhood, my Pepita!”--it amounted to
that, after all.




CHAPTER III

PLAYING AT GOD


“I think it is going to be Logan Thane,” Peter decided, as she paused
for a moment in the pleasing process of dressing for the dance, to
stand bare-limbed before the fire, and feel its warmth run and leap and
shiver over her skin; one of those luxuries to which memories of chill
apartments and scrambled toilets now gave a zest and flavour. Peter
liked equally the action of slowly drawing a cigarette from its silver
case; the use of a bathroom, gleaming white tiles and silver taps and
mist-wreaths dimming the mirror on the wall. Things which Merle took as
a matter of course. Merle found her keenest enjoyment in escape for a
whole day to Thatch Lane, to trespass over barbed-wire fencing in dank
and thorny woods; discarding, for an old skirt and jersey of Peter’s,
the elaborately suitable-for-the-country raiment provided by Madame
des Essarts. Madame’s mental vision of these expeditions showed her
granddaughter reclining upon a cushioned chair, in a very clean field,
the while Miss Worthing’s footman (non-existent) asked if she took
sugar and milk, and Peter added solicitously: “You must put up with our
picnic teas, Merle, dearest. Will you have some Devonshire cream on
your home-baked bread?”

Ever since their conversation on the second-empire bedspread, a
fortnight before, the two girls were almost hypnotically persuaded
that the forthcoming ball was to furnish, as far as their scheme of
things was concerned, some startling issue. During their intercourse
of two and a half years, the male element in its more serious form had
been conspicuously and even unnaturally lacking. Peter was aware that
this state of things could not possibly continue, in the case of two
so magnetically alive. She had sought to forestall the Inevitable, by
herself weaving in the thread. To-night she would choose its colour.
To-night!... it was fun, playing at God.

Logan Thane fixed himself firmer and ever firmer in her imagination,
while she put on her gold stockings and shoes, her bronze
evening-dress, with its border of rich fur, and swathed gold sash. His
name held possibilities; and she was not averse to the background of
antlers and hothouse grapes, catalogued by Merle. She added to these,
roses, and a sweet white-haired mother; picturing agreeably how the
latter would describe Merle and herself as “quite at home in Thane
Manor; running in and out all day; dear girls, both of them!”--Logan at
this juncture tossed them an expressive smile from where he stood, as
per arrangement, smiting his boot with a riding-whip.

And if he should fall in love with one or the other of them....

“It would be rough luck on Merle,” mused Peter, drawing on her long
white kid gloves.

Certainly Peter was divinely human!

       *       *       *       *       *

Someone knocking at the door:

“Are you ready?” cries Jinny, aged fourteen; “the Lesters are here, and
don’t I just wish I was going too!”

Peter is staying the week-end with some twice-removed cousins in a
Turnham Green boarding-house; a convenience of which she frequently
availed herself, when evening pleasure-seeking made it impossible for
her to catch the last train from Euston to Thatch Lane. The Lester
boys and their sister, friends of Merle, had offered to fetch her in
their car and bring her home again.

“And so if we don’t enjoy ourselves,” proposes Rose-Marie, a nervous
débutante, “we can keep to our own party....” The car moves slowly
forward in a long queue.

Peter is not enthusiastic. Both the Lester boys are under twenty,
and have pimples on their chins. She wishes--in the cloakroom now,
and in the approved fashion letting her wrap fall languidly from her
shoulders, to be caught by dexterous and silent attendants--that the
thought of Merle hostess of this magnificence, did not remove her so
very far from the Merle of their adventure days.

The staircase again, and conventional figures in black and white,
struggling with their glove-buttons. Which of them is Logan Thane?
“Wait for me,” pleads Rose-Marie, still busy with her powder-puff. A
burst of music from the ballroom, striking thrilling response from the
tuned-up senses. Events moving with the swift unreality of a cinema.
The ballroom swims forward and engulfs Peter with its hum of talk,
rising and falling like waves on a flat beach; its light mellowed by
blossoms; blossoms made translucent by light. Impression of a group
just within the doorway; Merle’s grandmother, from a mere solicitous
voice in Lancaster Gate: “Es-tu fatiguée, chérie?” knuckles that tapped
the door and a rustle that swept the staircase,--now materialized into
diamonds, and Point d’Alençon, and dignified, almost royal, reception
of the entering guests. Mademoiselle des Essarts, a little to her left,
beauty in faint old-rose and lilac, silver-threaded; a tiny moon-shaped
black patch below the lip; a bouquet of lilies of the valley.
Mademoiselle des Essarts--“Elle est exquise,” whisper the diplomats and
the ambassadors and the consuls, beribboned and bearded, who surround
Madame, and lend a contrast of French court circles to the assembly of
bostoning twentieth-century youth.

Mademoiselle des Essarts receives Miss Kyndersley with grave unsmiling
courtesy, and introduces: “Mr. Milligan.”

Is this the owner of a new motor-car, or a Designing Female?
Desperately Peter tries to collect her whirling thoughts, while Merle,
according to previous arrangement, detaches herself from other duties,
to present one partner after another; names that sound familiar: “the
son of a judge ... can imitate ducklings ... black waistcoat where
others elect to wear white,”--easily distinguishable, this last; “a
life-story ... serious intentions ... seven devils and a shoe-black”
... the descriptions on the list jostle each other, and form part of
the brilliant kaleidoscopic blur which goes to make Peter’s evening.
She is beginning to enjoy the keen sense of expectancy with which she
herself has infused the air. Light as the flutter of a peaseblossom,
Merle blows across the polished floor: “Peter, have you a dance left? I
want to introduce you----” no, the pink card is already scribbled over
from top to bottom.

“Never mind; you can cut--let me see!” coolly Mademoiselle scans the
names, and crosses off a harmless personage bearing the Oriental title
of Otto Mann. “He’s not important” ... and she presents Mr. Thane,
who looks rather astonished at these unceremonious proceedings, but
laughingly accepts number twenty-three, the last waltz but one.

“I believe you’ll do!” thinks Peter exultantly. But nevertheless, she
will give other unconscious candidates their chance. Her peculiar
talent for playing up, body and soul, to whatever part be thrust upon
her, can be exercised to its full in the swift coming and going, change
and interchange of companionship, that is ballroom custom.

The first waltz stirs the air. The first skilful probing of the
material with which she has to deal: cue given: “Don’t you find these
affairs leave an empty feeling behind them?”... so be it, then; the
Puritan maid--for ten minutes. And you, sir, what may be your demands?
Can’t be bothered with depths, or all that bally rot? Come then, we
will e’en butterfly together.... And the music strikes up for the next
one-step; Papillon bows and departs, and--who will come in his stead?
Walk up! walk up, gentlemen all! Here are a variety of goods in one
parcel: the Artistic Understanding; the Tantalizing Sphinx; Up-to-date
Woman of the World, with trick of shoe and eyelash and epigram--this
for the youth who will not be thought young; quickly alternating to
the Clear-eyed Delightful Child: her first dance, and it’s all such
splendid fun! Almost can Thirty-nine, cynical, weary, and grizzled at
the temples, be brought to say: “Little girl, you make the years fall
from me....”

Peter wriggles happily. Who can denounce her conduct as unfair? Who,
at a masquerade, music-led, rose-fragrant, expects to confront aught
but fellow-masqueraders?... Here comes another--Aha! I recognize
you, my friend; you are he who vibrates like a jelly in dancing,
and--apprehensively she glances down at her gold shoes in danger from
the kiss of Othello.

Take from Peter what you please, gentlemen all! not for your sakes,
believe me that. For Peter’s sake; for the glorification of her
talents, and for the fun of it, and because you may take from Peter
what you please, so it be not Peter. And she is safe enough, dodging
mischievously from one disguise to another, rather wishing--through all
the breathless shift and stir and glimmer--to meet for once her equal
in skill and tactics. But it will come with the twenty-third waltz of
the evening, promised to Antlers-and-Hothouse-Grapes; she has staged
her climax cunningly, to crown the end of masquerade.

Supper with Mark St. Quentin, who had two years previously sent her
a dozen handkerchiefs, in lieu of the gory one, tenderly retained;
thus making for the ministering angel a clear profit of seventeen
handkerchiefs, reckoning Merle’s half-dozen. He has spent this evening
in being to Peter the cement which knits loose bricks together;
watching her hungrily when she slides away in the embrace of another;
slipping into the gap when a partner chances to be late; taking the
first dance and the last dance and the supper-dance, and any extras
she cares to give, and all the numbers she wishes to cut. Quite
pleasant, the consciousness of Mark St. Quentin to fill with his
stolid and persistent personality the tiniest chink and crevice which
the intoxicating hours might otherwise have left empty. Nor is it
difficult to supply him with the goods he wants: a solicitous reference
to the episode of the thumb, and Peter is established as fragrant
sweet-natured woman, thank Heaven, still surviving in a century of
Suffragettes and kleptomaniacs--“And druggists,” adds Mark St. Quentin;
“Morphia, you know.”

After-supper hours, bringing with them the usual flushed dishevelment,
actual and spiritual. Blooms beginning to droop in the heat; prevailing
carelessness as to the hieroglyphics actually scrawled on the
programme; bold voices, mingling with the bandsmen’s deeper notes, as
they chorus to the popular encore, imperiously demanded. Lingerings
on the stairs, and where softly-lit seclusion is provided for those
who care to linger. Departure of the suave and elderly diplomats;
Madame des Essarts must perforce wait, royalty unattended, till
romping insatiable youth shall have drunk its fill. Her reflections on
modern dancing, its antics and exaggerations, are such as to preclude
description. She is pleased to note, however, that her granddaughter’s
burnished dark head is still unruffled, her complexion unheated. “Elle
est vraie des Essarts!”

Number twenty-one. Merle and Peter, skilfully guided where the throng
is thickest, smile at one another in passing, eager, in the midst
of enjoyment, for the mutual retrospection of the morrow. Comes the
interval between twenty-two and twenty-three. Armand Drélincourt, for
the third time in four hours, discourses with immense relish upon
his fatal temperament. Peter listens attentively, but springs to her
feet, interrupting the narrative at its most thrilling point, when the
far-off tinkle of a bell reaches her ear: “Hadn’t we better go down?”
Having settled on Logan Thane as a piratical playmate, she is frankly
excited at the prospect of number twenty-three.

He is not waiting near the door of the ballroom. Neither is he in the
stream descending the stairs. Peter waits impatiently till he shall
choose to end his flirtation behind some draped _portière_. Already the
dancers are in full swing. Rose-Marie approaches: “Shall we go home
now, Peter? Most people have left; it looks so bad to be among the
last.” And behold St. Quentin standing faithful as the painted sentinel
of Herculaneum: “May I have the pleasure, Miss Kyndersley?”

“I’m booked already,--where _is_ Logan Thane?”

“But your partner seems to have deserted you. Silly fellow; he doesn’t
know what he’s missing.”

Peter privately agrees. It takes still three minutes to convince her
that Logan Thane has undoubtedly cut his dances and gone home early;
and then she lets St. Quentin reap the reward of his tireless vigil: “I
shall be leaving after this one, so we may as well finish it instead of
the next.” She has flushed richly and her eyes are dark with annoyance.
Childishly, she wants Logan Thane to have a sense of all that might
have been his, had he not succumbed to weariness.

“Peter,” Rose-Marie’s voice, plaintive now; “the car has been waiting
over an hour already, and mother said----”

“All right.” Peter disengages herself from the infatuated St. Quentin,
murmurs her thanks to her hostess, looks around in vain for Merle, and
suffers herself to be led by Rose-Marie to the cloak-room.

Downstairs, a few stray couples, clinging still to the fringes of
pleasure, boston stormily to the strains of “Gipsy Love.” The massed
flowers on the walls hang heavier and heavier yet. Madame has yawned
twice, daintily, behind her Pompadour fan. As the last notes die away,
Merle dashes for the doorway, dragging her partner in her wake.

“Peter!--she hasn’t gone yet, has she, grandmaman?” She succeeds in
waylaying Peter, cloaked and reluctant, on her passage down the main
staircase.

“You mustn’t go. I want you to dance the next with Stuart.” Merle’s
tone conveys all she dares put into it of meaning and entreaty. Peter
shakes her head, indicating Rose-Marie, inclined to be fractious.

“Leave her to me. _Do_ go on, Peter.”

Peter wavers; the ballroom, after good-byes have been spoken and wraps
adjusted, becomes doubly a place of enchantment, if only because
etiquette debars from re-entering.

She looks at Stuart Heron.

And he, for his part, tries to trace the connection between a tall
girl in a bronze evening-cloak, and a picture which has forced itself
irrelevantly upon his mental vision: picture of a Cavalier emerging
from some dark doorway; backward-floating plume, and mantle carelessly
flung; swagger and smile expressive of all that lurked in his quest of
love and hazard, and peradventure of hazardous love....

“Go on, Peter,” urges Merle. “You’ll like him.”

Peter hesitates no longer; tosses aside her cloak; and permits Stuart
to escort her back to the regions of light whence she had thought
to be self-banished. The band is crashing out in true Bacchanalian
frenzy the last waltz of all, the waltz of their release. Twenty years
before, and it would have been: “After the ball is over,” with its
cloying suggestions of regret and sentiment; but modern youth requires
something at once more abandoned and more discordant.

Stuart speaks: “She said I was going to like you.”

“And she said I was going to like you.”

Then in earnest duet: “How we’re bound to hate each other!”

He is a little above medium height; their eyes are almost on a level.
He cannot rid himself of the impression that whatever he says now, is
likely to matter later on. And the entire contents of his brain have
wandered round the corner, and sitting there, mock his futility.

“No,” contradicting his own statement. “I don’t think we shall hate
each other; at least, not more than is necessary to preserve mutual
interest.” Why are they hurrying the time, those fool musicians? How
long can one decently sit out with a girl, after the last candle is
extinguished, and a lackey is holding her cloak in readiness? Seven
minutes, perhaps? He will have to give her in that seven minutes
lightning indications of all that is in him worth her knowing; whet her
curiosity, and at the same time satisfy his own. The undertaking is a
breathless one.

“Who are you?” Peter queries, having in vain tried to fit him with some
attributes of Merle’s catalogue. “I can’t place you at all, and----”

“And what?” he leaps in, for she has paused, and there is no time to
pause; two more couples have ceased to dance, and are busy encircling
Madame des Essarts with an aura of thanksgiving and farewell. “And
what?”

“And Merle introduced you as if you mattered.”

“Merle was quite right. I do matter.”

“Merle?”

“Why not? I’m a relic of her childhood.”

“It makes you sound like Stonehenge.”

“You strive rather after effect, don’t you?” He slings this at her,
himself striving after effect.

“Of course. Would you have me display at once all the domestic virtues?”

“You haven’t any,” tauntingly. “Not one. Other girls can cook nothing
but an omelette. You, I’m sure, can cook nothing at all. It must be a
proud boast. I hate talking while I dance, don’t you?”

In silence they finish the waltz. Then Stuart sweeps her through a pair
of velvet hangings, down two rooms, and to a sofa at the far end of a
third, before she is well aware of his intentions. She takes a sidelong
survey of his outward marks: features that vie for room with his
monocle and quickly-changing expression, giving an effect to his face
of overcrowding; a mouth corner-tilted and impish, such as is sometimes
perceived in a small street-arab, but mostly in a leprechaun, who can
only be met hammering shoes on moor and crag by moonlight. She notes
further that his jaw is lean, with the forward bent of a runner; and
his head, which by dint of hard brushing and grooming gives at first
an effect of conventional sleekness, is in reality a most rebellious
and intricate affair, no hair growing in precisely the same direction
as its fellow, but each insisting it will beat out like Bret Harte’s
pioneer, “a way of his own, a way of his own!”

From the distant ballroom, snatches of “God save the King” drift and
die and are re-born, with an effect of inexpressible melancholy.
And, sighing, Stuart relinquishes desire to show the girl all his
sides before dawn--philosophical, tender, childish, manly, sporting,
whimsical, or political,--resigns himself to proving merely that he is
original.

“You can never get away from your likeness to a Reynolds’ Angel,” à
propos of nothing; “because there are five of them, so that if the
expression should miss one, it will hit the next; I’m sorry for you, of
course, but there is nothing to be done about it. Do you live anywhere?
Forgive me for these astounding acrobatics, but I’m so afraid you will
be fetched by your nurse Rose-Marie; I heard you remark she was growing
fractious.”

“I live in Thatch Lane with an aunt. My mother is dead, and my father
unmentionable, to save you from the agonies of a tactless question.”

... The bandsmen are dimly visible, packing away their mute
instruments. A voice from the long-ago is calling faintly “Peter” ...
hastily she covers the sound: “_What_ are you? A stockbroker?”

“No,” he too has heard, and speaks rather breathlessly; “do I make love
like a stockbroker?”

“You haven’t.”

“I have, in my own subtle fashion. But I _can’t_ overleap the first
stages in this Post-impressionist preliminary scamper of ours.”

... “Pet-er! Pe-ter!” clearer now--and nearer.

“A stockbroker has but seven stages of love-making, and by these shall
ye know him,” laughs Peter.

“And I have a hundred and seven, and seven more after that, and by none
of these shall ye know me.”

“Do you always talk about yourself?”

“No,” desperately; “I can talk about ever so many things: Cathedrals,
and good form, and machinery, and how to make pins. Oh, and
metaphysics. Particularly metaphysics. I took a double first at Oxford.
I’ve no right to tell you, but I want you to know,” with the first
touch of boyishness that has as yet escaped the hard polished surface
of his manner.

... “I can’t think where she is,” Merle replies courteously, two rooms
off.

... “Pee-ee-eee-ter!”

--“Confound it! How can I be eloquent with that phantom female forever
squawking like the poor cat i’ the adage.”

Peter remarks, caring not a whit for Rose-Marie: “I’m sure that an
adage is a medieval Scotch pantry, and that the cat was stealing the
cream.”

“The ‘Cat and Adage’ wouldn’t be a bad public-house,” Stuart reflects;
“in case I shouldeverwanttobuilda--damn!” in an outburst of frenzied
and polysyllabic fury, as a little procession, consisting of Merle,
Rose-Marie, the two brothers of Rose-Marie, and Mark St. Quentin,
advance with triumphant shoutings towards the truants’ retreat.

His curses are overtopped by St. Quentin’s pæans of victory:

“I told you I’d seen them come this way. You’ve given us a rare hunt,
Miss Kyndersley.” And the eldest and most pimply of the Lester twins
shakes a playful finger:

“Bedtime, you know, Miss Peter. No good running away and hiding.”

“Good night,” Stuart turns abruptly away, not caring to form part of
the returning procession across three rooms. Nor does he express any
audible hopes of renewing an acquaintance so delightfully begun.

       *       *       *       *       *

“Well?” Merle threw a world of mischievous expectancy into the
interrogation, when Peter paid her promised visit at tea-time the
following day.

Merle was lying on the couch, her back supported by many cushions,
a silken wrap thrown lightly over her feet. For Madame des Essarts
cherished the notion that constitutions of delicate birth were
necessarily also of delicate health, to attain which desirable
consummation, she kept a venerable and witty doctor in daily
attendance, and reduced Merle on the slightest provocation from the
vertical to the horizontal.

Peter tossed down her hat, and sank into a curly-legged arm-chair.

“I wish this weren’t such an impossible room,” she grumbled; “what
with gilt and tapestries and priceless china and painted ladies on the
ceiling, I can hardly hear myself speak. It’s the sort of room you
can’t take up and wrap round you. What we ought to do, Merle, is with
the aid of a ladder, a big apron, and a bottle of gum, cover the walls
ourselves in brown paper, like those brave bright Bohemian bachelor
girls in books.”

“Well?” quoth Merle again, disregarding the Bohemian girls.

“And then the supreme insult of a central heating system, when every
fibre of me yearns for firelight. How would it be to light a fire of
sticks on the carpet? Would your grandmother mind?”

“Shouldn’t think so,” murmured Merle. “It’s only Aubusson, and she’s
a reasonable woman, and you could always explain to her that you were
being the Swiss Family Robinson.”

“Or Robinson Crusoe. Why, do you suppose, are shipwrecked islanders
always called Robinson? Is it something wild and primitive that lies in
the name?”

“You know,” Merle suggested gently, “it’s not necessary to be quite so
garrulous, to convince me that you want to hear about Stuart Heron.”

Peter gave in: “Who is he?”

“A millionaire.”

“That’s a nuisance. Is he sensitive about it? No, he doesn’t give
me the impression of being sensitive about anything. He’s hard and
polished and invulnerable; Achilles without the heel.”

“Three months’ treatment, and you’ll be crying aloud that he’s all heel
and no Achilles.”

Nicole entered with the tea equipage, containing much of chased
silver; and conversation was for a moment suspended.

“Mademoiselle Peter should not have risen from bed to-day,” severely.
“She must surely be fatigued after so late an evening.”

“I was one of those who left early,” Peter mendaciously assured the old
woman, of whom she stood in distinct awe.

“Nicole, you’ve forgotten the cream, and Mdlle. Peter is here. You know
her love of cream is only equalled by her hatred of cows.”

Nicole looked respectfully incredulous: “Surely not, Mademoiselle. But
if it were not for the good kind cows, what would Mademoiselle put in
her tea?”

“I _don’t_ put cows in my tea,” Peter protested unhappily. And as
Nicole, with many chucklings, withdrew, “Merle, why do you hold me up
to scorn before your staff? And I want more about Stuart--Heron, did
you say?”

“Awfully Heron. They all are. And quite indecently rich. He
has a mother, and three uncles, and a married sister, and some
cousins--pretty girls. Family existing for the worship of Stuart,
sole son of the house of Heron. And all things bright and beautiful,
all things great and small, all things wise and wonderful, the Herons
have them all. I don’t know much more about them, except presents;
they’re for ever giving each other presents; costly trifles, such as a
villa on the Riviera, or a Rolls-Royce motor, or a new hothouse, or a
sackful of pink diamonds. Whenever you go there, Mrs. Heron is sure to
say: ‘Oh, let me show you the chocolate-coloured page-boy that Stuart
gave me because he scored a goal at football’; or ‘do help me think of
a present for my brother-in-law, it’s the anniversary of his wife’s
death. Last time I gave him twenty-four pairs of silk pyjamas sewn with
seed-pearls; do you suppose he would like the Only Orinoco Orchid? I
hear you can get it for five hundred guineas.’”

“Don’t be ridiculous, and pass the cake,” laughed Peter. “Besides, all
this doesn’t explain Stuart.”

“I don’t know much about Stuart; of course I was taken there as a
child, but then----” Merle’s eyes grew large and wistful, “I wasn’t a
child; I was a French doll, in beautiful, expensive clothes, and not
allowed to romp with the other children. So I suppose Stuart despised
me. In fact, he told me as much last night; that since we’ve been
grown-up he has avoided me for fear I should break. He’s only three
years down from Oxford.”

“So young? I took him for about thirty.”

“Twenty-five, I believe.”

“He mentioned Oxford--isn’t Nicole going to bring that cream?--but I
doggedly refused to take notice. ’Varsity is the one subject I will not
discuss with the initiated; I pronounce Magdalen as God meant it to
be pronounced, mix up dons with proctors, and earn for myself undying
contempt. So it’s better left alone.”

Nicole entered with the cream, and the intimation that Monsieur Heron
desired to speak with Mademoiselle des Essarts on the telephone.

“The game commences in earnest,” laughed Merle. “But I don’t want to
get up. You answer it, Peter.”

Peter, nothing loath, ran downstairs to the boudoir, and replaced
Madame des Essarts at the mouthpiece: “Hello!”

“Hello--look here,” came Stuart’s unmistakable tones from the other
end; tones veiling with the typical Oxford accent a curious eagerness
as of a dog forever worrying and shaking a bone. “Look here, how’s my
mother?”

“I’m not good at arithmetic.”

“Your grandmother has asked me three times, and I feel I ought to have
known. I said ‘quite well, thanks,’ but now I come to think of it, she
isn’t. Would it be the right thing to ring off, and ring up again to
contradict the statement.”

“It would be easier on the whole to cure your mother, and get it right
that way.”

“I say, it isn’t Merle. It’s you.”

“Yes, it’s me. Merle’s lying down.”

A pause. Then a chuckle from the other end.

“I trust you have recovered from the fatigues of the dance, Peter. I
recollect that you were among the last to go.”

She assured him politely that she was suffering from no ill-effects,
and trusted he was the same. And she passed over the use of her
Christian name.

“What are you talking about, you two girls? Irish-stew of the night
before? Have I come in yet?”

“Perhaps you don’t come in.”

“I _am_ coming in,” something very like a threat in the assurance. “I’m
in already. Well in. Merle told me about the projected Triumvirate.”

Peter sped an indignant glance towards the absent Merle, for not
informing her of this breach of faith; and a look of defiance at
Stuart, who could not see it, for daring to laugh, which he wasn’t.

“I’m afraid I had a purpose in ’phoning,” he continued; “though it
would be splendid to say I’d rung up for no reason whatever. Will you
ask Merle if she’ll come with me to a dance at the Cecil, next Tuesday
evening, and bring her little friend.”

Peter refused to rise to such a palpable throw. “Tickets?”

“I’ve got them. Four. Can you provide another male of some sort?”

“I’ll ask Merle. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye.”

She returned to find Merle being cherished by her grandmother, so that
a careful version of the foregoing invitation needed to be given:

“Mr. Heron is making up a party, and hopes we will join him; and at the
same time benefit a charity in which he is interested.”

Madame des Essarts gave the scheme her gracious acquiescence. “He
doubtless wishes to revenge himself for last night,” she mused
approvingly; “but it is a somewhat hurried courtesy.” For there existed
nothing in which she was so punctilious as in these social accounts
of give and take; accounts which Merle insisted were as carefully
noted and balanced as any butcher’s or baker’s. So much debit, so much
credit; a nice perception of how many teas given went to cancel one
luncheon taken. So now:

“If you are to invite another gentleman, _mon enfant_, it must be Mr.
St. Quentin; you remember he motored us to Ranelagh.” Madame touched
Peter’s cheek lightly with her hand, besought her not to tire Merle or
herself with too much conversation, and rustled away, leaving in her
train a faint swish and perfume. Whereupon Peter re-edited truthfully
the duologue.

--“Merle, why did you tell him about the trio, and--and all that rot?”

“Rot?”

“He thinks so. He probably thinks it--oh, girlish!”

“He’s going to count,” said Merle. “And ... Peter----”

“What?”

“Three is a funny shape,” the younger girl admitted slowly. “I think it
might mean two and one. And I think, Peter, we shall have to settle,
you and I, to be square with each other, in the triangle.”

“What a ghastly geometrical figure: If the square ABCD standing on the
base of the triangle XYZ----”

But Merle was not laughing. “We must agree to talk things out, and
always get them clear, even if it should mean disloyalty to Stuart.
Because I believe he’s the strongest.”

Peter considered this a moment, while she emptied the cream-jug into
her cup. “Yes,” she decided at length. “But we’ll tell him that you and
I are going to keep the path unblocked between us. It will be fairer;
and save him from blundering.”

“He won’t blunder,” Merle prophesied. “And I think, too, that he’s
capable of calling a taxi.”

Peter laughed:

“I’d forgotten the taxis; of course, they were the original means of
bringing him in. But I rather wonder what he hopes to find.”




CHAPTER IV

THE SHAPE OF THREE


The shape began to assert itself already on the way to the Cecil.
Merle, Peter and Stuart discovered that their three-cornered talk
flashed forth with uncommon swiftness and brilliancy, as if drawing
inspiration one from the other; that a spirit and being came alive that
belonged not to any two of them, nor yet to any one, but could only be
borne of just that conjunction of three. So that they were palpitating
with eagerness to continue exploration in the kingdom which their
magical number had thrown open to them, when Mark St. Quentin, symbol
of a world without meanings, met them, as arranged, in the ballroom.

As far as St. Quentin was concerned, the evening proved a failure,
strongly reminding him of a phase in his rather lonely childhood, when
elder brothers and sisters used to glory in the flaunting of their
“secrets.” Though of just what these miraculous “secrets” consisted he
could never discover. Nor could he discover now what was the curious
excitement that seemed to quiver in his alternate partners; and he was
certainly baffled by the bewildering fashion of their talk. As well
he might be; for Peter and Merle, dizzied by the constant change and
interchange of male involved by quartette, occasionally allowed their
separate manners to overlap, with merely amusing results when Stuart
received the St. Quentin dregs, but absolutely fatal when St. Quentin
was by mistake driven to cope with some startling turn of phrase that
should have been Stuart’s portion.

They were being shockingly ill-bred, the three; not a doubt of it. But
a hardness of heart and an oblivion of manners descends upon those
who, on Tom Tiddler’s Ground, are picking up gold and silver, towards
those incapable of perceiving the alluring glitter; and St. Quentin
was finally reduced to concentrate his hopes upon supper, which meal
he fondly anticipated might “draw them all together a bit.” Also, a
man of little imagination, he ascribed the dreary void within him on
contemplating the Tiddlerites, as due to hunger. So that when Stuart
announced carelessly after the eighth dance: “Had about enough now,
haven’t we?” he so far forgot himself as to expostulate with some
fervour:

“Oh, I say. But I thought we were stopping on for supper, anyway.”

“So did I,” replied Stuart. “But my partners seem rather anxious to get
home.”--Merle looked astonished, but understood that she was expected
to play up to some dark sub-current of intention.

“Grandmaman did beg me not to be late,” demurely. Which happened to be
true.

“But Miss Kyndersley,” St. Quentin turned with dying hopes to Peter;
“won’t you stay and have supper?”

“I’m afraid I can’t, if Merle doesn’t.” Peter, not in the mood as yet
to renounce gaiety, was inclined to be indignant with Stuart for his
ill-disguised anxiety to quit.

“A jolly little supper,” wailed the odd man out, seeing _pâté_ and
lobster slipping irrevocably through his fingers.

On the threshold of the hotel rose another slight discussion: “I’ll see
the ladies home; it’s on my way,” from Stuart.

“Oh, but----”

“It’s on my way,” firmly. And he had hailed a taxi, for which vehicles
he certainly possessed magnetic attractions, had helped in Merle and
Peter, and had given the address at Lancaster Gate, before St. Quentin
was allowed a chance to proffer services. As the latter stood beneath
the awninged steps, watching the swift departure, every line of face
and figure seemed to quiver forth in resentful unison: “A jolly little
supper....”

The car shot round the corner. Stuart let down the window and leant
out: “Drive to the Billet-doux,” he commanded curtly, giving the name
of a celebrated little French restaurant on the border-line between
fashion and Bohemia.

Peter laughed, understanding; and because his methods amused her. But
Merle gasped in some disturbance.

“Sorry,” said Stuart. “But it was essential to get rid of him, wasn’t
it? I don’t mean him personally, but any other existent fourth.”

“But he was of our party,” Merle rebuked him gravely, conscious of
being alone in her defence of good manners.

“I think not,” laughed Stuart; “merely a stage property.”

They drew up before the quaint white hostelry in Soho; set off by its
dark and murky surroundings, and proclaiming aloud its aloofness from
these, by the ostentatious guardianship of two commissionaires.

Passing through the swing doors, Merle was caught up by the tumult of
voices and ring of glass within; forgot to be prim and censorious; gave
herself over entirely to the joy of this unexpected, and--as far as
Madame des Essarts was concerned--forbidden truancy.

So they came for the first time to the Billet-doux, destined to prove
one of the permanent backgrounds to their triangular career. And the
austere and melancholy Spanish waiter who assisted them to uncloak,
did not for a moment guess how he was to be puzzled by the alternate
qualities and quantities of their future comings; merely noticed that
the party seemed in excellent spirits, and that the gentleman spent
commendably little time and breath in his selection of the supper. And
here again the girls silently approved.

Peter leant forward across the table: “There’s something to be settled
without further delay,” she announced, half in mockery, and withal
letting a tinge of earnest invade her tones. “It’s tactless to mention
it, but--you’re a millionaire, aren’t you?”

Stuart assented, very ashamed.

“We’ve agreed to forgive,” Peter went on, “on the condition that you
let us forget. No chucking about of gold purses to the populace, mark
you. As long as you never permit us to see more than two sovereigns at
a time, our three-ship shall endure. But the rest of your vast fortune,
and all your motor-cars and boot-trees, you must hide in mattresses and
banks. Is that understood?”

“Can’t you make it guineas,” he pleaded unhappily. And in consideration
of his quenched demeanour, they agreed to expand the limits by a florin.

“I suppose you had better know the worst,” he continued gloomily,
helping them to varieties of sardines that, like Diogenes, dwelt mainly
in tubs. “I’m a diamond-merchant.”

Merle burst out laughing. “Oh, Stuart, how comical! Do you wear a silk
hat?”

“_And_ a face to match. You must invade the offices one day, and see me
in the act.”

“You take it seriously, then?”

“Desperately. Notice the absorbed face of a small boy playing at
grown-ups; if he were laughing all the time, he wouldn’t be enjoying
the game.”

“But if we really do bear down upon you, will you give us a sign that
it’s all right? Because otherwise I’m terrified of the ‘business face.’”

“One sign ye shall have, and no more. After that I’ll expect you to
play also, and take proper interest in diamonds, and listen prettily to
the Khalif,--it doesn’t matter about the One-eyed Calendar.”

And here Merle demanded explanations, which were midway interrupted
by a wail of despair from Peter; she had somehow contrived to mix her
implements so that whichever way she worked it, the fish-knife would be
left for dessert. Stuart looked for enlightenment at Merle:

“Doesn’t she know? Has no one told her? Are we to pretend not to see?”

“She springs from the people,” Merle answered his aside. “The kind that
wear curl-papers and barrows. I’ll tell you all about it when we’re
alone.”

... Stuart and Merle, if only in jest; and Peter the outsider. Not for
one moment could the flexible triangle retain its form.

“Let it be clearly understood,” broke in Peter, defiantly holding out
the wrong glass, that wine might be poured into it, “that except for
the benefit of Fernand, I refuse to be: ‘and your little friend also.’”

“Who is Fernand?” from Stuart.

Merle owned to an elder brother who dwelt in Paris. “Peter and I were
once upon a time allowed to travel alone from England to the South of
France, to join Grandmaman in Nice. _En route_, I gave Peter a party
consisting of Fernand, and a first-class _wagon-lit_.”

“In juxtaposition?” murmured Stuart. Peter, for fear of Merle’s little
reserves, flashed him a glance of warning. The shape had altered
again.... Obviously it was impossible to keep intimacy of speech and
spirit moving between more than two points; the idea was to spin it so
swiftly from one to another and then on, as to give the appearance of
all three simultaneously involved.

Peter took up the narrative:

“Fernand Alfonso des Essarts, the essence of decorum and propriety, met
us at the Gare du Nord, and escorted us across Paris. He carried a big
box of chocolates for Merle, and a smaller one for her little friend
also. He conveyed to Merle the compliments of all her unknown relatives
in Paris; and she cast down her eyes, transformed to an embodiment of
the virginal _jeune fille_, convent-fresh and dewy, and conveyed to
him the compliments of all his unknown relatives in London. And they
thanked each other separately for each one. In this wise did they
continue to converse. He asked her if she were thirsty--‘And you also,
Mademoiselle, you are thirsty?’ ‘And I also, Monsieur, I am thirsty,’
sez I, likewise convent-fresh and dewy. He displayed polite interest in
her progress at the piano--‘And you also, Mademoiselle, you play the
piano?’ ‘And I also, Monsieur, I play the piano.’--I don’t, by the way,
Stuart; it’s quite all right. And Fernand surveyed his beautiful boots,
and probably thought of his beautiful grisette, neglected that evening
for the sake of these _embêtantes_ young English misses. And with an
inspiration he asked Merle if she had _mal-de-mer_ in crossing--‘And
you also, Mademoiselle, you had _mal-de-mer_ in crossing?’ ‘And I also,
Monsieur, I had _mal-de-mer_ in crossing. Very!’ The word too much did
it, and Fernand addressed me no more.”

“I hope the _wagon-lit_ proved a compensation for your temporary
effacement,” laughed Stuart.

He sat opposite them, as it were one pitted against two. And the
girls marvelled anew that aught with the looks and costume and
bearing of conventional man-about-town, eye-glass and knowledge of
the wine-list, should yet have caught the melody of their pipes, and
revealed in response his own nimble goat-legs. The proximity of the
mirror which enlarged their number to six, lent a grotesque flavour
to the scene, allowing each of the players the illusion of being at
the same time spectator; placing the table, with its shining napery
and silver, tumbled shimmer of whitebait, and dull red Burgundy in
the glasses, outside and apart from reality. Stuart, catching at one
moment the reflected eyes of his companions, toasted them silently in
phantom wine ... and it needed a curious effort, a tug of the will,
before they could recall their glances from the three puppets in
looking-glass-land, to meet, each of them, their two companions in the
flesh. The light and stir of the restaurant, the drifting brilliant
figures from one crowded room to another, the gay groups, talking,
laughing, were all, as it were, subordinated, like supers in a stage
set. So the solicitous waiter, hovering, might have been stolen from
some sinister Spanish masque of passion and hatred. From an outer
chamber, drifted wailing snatches of violin-play. The ghost of Mark St.
Quentin glided into the vacant seat to Peter’s right. “A jolly little
supper,” he murmured reproachfully....

“Three coffees, black,” Stuart ordered of the waiter; “And--green
Chartreuse, both of you? I think so; three green Chartreuses.” He
did not consult their tastes, hoping to gauge them accurately by
intuition, or else luck. He held a match to their cigarettes; and,
reverting to the topic of their journey, suggested that a _wagon-lit_
might be rather a nice domestic animal: “A tame red _wagon-lit_ with
trustful brown eyes. I wonder if my wife would let me keep one in the
back-garden, among the washing.”

Merle was overcome by a vision of the future wife of the
diamond-merchant hanging up the diamond-merchant’s pants on a
clothes-line, every Monday morning.

“Just fancy,” Stuart burst forth, “the indignity of having to ask
permission before one could keep a fox-terrier or a _wagon-lit_. I can
_not_ understand the state of mind which leads a man to marriage: the
eternal sucking of the same orange, when there are thousands for his
plucking.”

His tone was of the lightest, but Peter understood that it veiled a
warning. And she was conscious of a sudden rage that he should deem a
warning necessary.

“Prince of Orange,” she mocked him; “you probably waste your kingdom.”

But he boasted: “Not so. For I am aware of the exact instant just
before the juice is all spent and the skin will taste bitter in my
mouth. And then I cast away my orange and gather another. There are
so many in the grove that sometimes indeed I am tempted to leave one
half-sucked, to try the flavour of the next. But I don’t ... I don’t.”

Merle put in: “You are speaking symbolically.”

“I am,” smiling at her--his leprechaun smile.

“And what of the pips? do you swallow them in the process?”

“Rather than spit them, yes. I likewise suck silently, and with great
haste, greediness and appreciation.”

“I wonder,” mused Peter, into her curling smoke-wreaths, “if the orange
has any views on the subject....”

Stuart heard: “That depends on the thickness of its skin.”

“Their rejected skins shall go to make your pathway to Hell. And the
whole way ye shall slip ignominiously.”

“Rather say I shall slide gloriously.”

“And bump at the bottom?”

“There are great virtues, even in a bump at the bottom, to those who
understand the art of swift recovery.”

Peter mused on this, while remarking idly that the pale glint of
Chartreuse held much more of evil than the frank winking serpent-green
of _crême-de-menthe_.

“Are you never natural?” she queried suddenly, recalling the man to
joyous sparring, from his tender admiration of Merle’s side-face,
which, one among a thousand, really merited the higher appellation of
profile.

“No, I don’t think so. What am I, natural? or you, or anyone else?
something that sleeps and eats and walks, and never enquires. Not of
such stuff are born the Orange-Suckers, the Hairpin-Visionists.”

“Hairpin-Visionists?” chorus of attracted femininity.

He explained: “If, whatever you are doing, you are able to project
yourself into the future, and from that point look back again to the
present, you can get your outlines clear, see where each step is
leading you, obtain a sense of proportion and values on the incident.
And that mental process follows the curves of an ordinary hairpin,
starting at one of the points--then forward--and back again. D’you
see?” he traced the diagram with his fingers on the table-cloth.

“Then you always live your life backwards, from some imaginary spot
seven or eight months hence? What a grotesque looking-glass existence!”

“The Billet-doux is lowering its lights,” remarked Stuart. And called
for the bill. They had supped luxuriously, and drunken of wine that lay
cradled in straw, a white muffler about its slender neck. So that the
reckoning amounted to two pounds three and twopence. Stuart was about
to fling down three pieces of gold--when he remembered....

Here was a quandary indeed.

Leaning across to Merle, he murmured in confidential and embarrassed
tones: “I say, I’m rather short of cash; forgive the awful cheek--could
you lend me half a crown?”

Very gravely she produced the coin: “It’s quite all right; please don’t
bother about returning it.” The notion of a Heron short of cash was
truly delightful.

“Peter,” snuggling her head sleepily against the older girl’s shoulder,
when they had taken their seats in the home-bound taxi. “Peter, are we
going to like him? I believe we are.”

Peter looked at Stuart--and surprised a rather lorn and out-of-it
expression on his face. There had been unconscious cruelty, perhaps
even coquetry, in Merle’s gesture and appeal; emphasizing his position
on the opposite seat; their snug drowsy security in the fortress he was
attempting to storm from without.

“You realize that, don’t you?” said Peter, hammering upon the nail;
“that Merle and I talk to each other; really talk. And that we’ll allow
you no quarter.”

“Thank you for the danger-signal.” Stuart smiled, and ceased to
resemble the lonely millionaire of fiction. The triangle for the moment
was clearly isosceles: a short line connecting points X and Z at the
base, while Y lay infinitely remote at the apex.

“It is going to be difficult,” thought Y exultantly.

For Stuart was nauseated by the rose-path.

       *       *       *       *       *

And the pride of them was like wind sweeping through the hair. Pride
of youth and good looks and active limb. Pride in their need of one
another, and their power to stand alone withal. Most of all, pride of
brain, that could leap from point to point, nor ever lose a foothold;
propound subtlety upon subtlety, each of the three eager to give the
corkscrew its final twist, till towards the seventh evolution they
would laughingly give up, and slowly unwind again. Brains that could be
adapted to any circumstances and any company; wring enjoyment from the
most unpromising material; brains that forgot not, so that reference
became a language, incomprehensible save to those who had invented the
cipher. Brains responsive, electric, in perfect working order. Pride of
brain, surely as splendid a thing as the more usual pride of body that
waits on youth.

The trio, definitely established, possessed a spirit of its own; its
actions were wilful and indeterminate, and none could know its soul
save by inspiration. It was built of cross-moods, cross-stimulations;
and it owned no leader nor follower, but changed its several parts from
moment to moment. A thing of fine complexity, the trio, that could
adjust itself to the shock of any outside problem or weariness,--in
fact, take unto and into itself these same problems and wearinesses,
and make of them part of the whole, subjugated to its domination. And
its god was the unknown, and its fear the Inevitable, and retrospect
its recreation, and in the Hairpin Vision lay its safety, and in sex
its slumbering danger.

The Spanish waiter, of a romantic disposition, took interest in the
Señor and two Señoritas who came so frequently to the Billet-doux;
and wondered when the former would begin to evince a preference. The
Spanish waiter, only human, went so far as to rejoice in the sight of
Peter and Stuart supping alone; since himself had begun to regard Merle
with a more than waiterly eye. He was both puzzled and furious, two
nights later, at the entrance of Stuart and Merle. And his bewilderment
knew no bounds, when, having at last decided the Señoritas were at
deadly enmity for their love of the capricious Señor, Peter and Merle
shattered this most plausible theory by lunching together in perfect
harmony of spirit. The Spanish waiter might stand as the first of a
collection of persons convinced of the madness of the trio: collection
of incidentals to their daily progress, such as railway-porters,
policemen, telephone operators, grocers, boatmen, parents, rustics and
Baldwin. Collection which Stuart proposed leaving to the Nation on
his death: “each individual to be labelled with date and circumstance
concurrent with his or her initiation to the belief of our complete
insanity.”

Peter found an instance: “Specimen 41: Respectable Old Gentleman. March
2nd, 1913. On accidentally catching sight of Trio solemnly smashing egg
at the end of Euston.”

“You know,” said Merle, “I don’t think he would have been so bewildered
if Stuart hadn’t explained to him that we always smash eggs at supreme
moments of our career; that we regard it as a religious ceremony; and
that our accompanying chant is taken from Scene I of Macbeth: “When
shall we three meet again?”--ending:

    “Fare is fowl, and fowl is broke;
    Take the white and leave for us the yolk.”

“It was an impromptu effort,” the author apologized. “And then he
didn’t see why the discovery of the End of Euston should be a supreme
moment, even in the life of a lunatic.”

Peter could best have enlightened the Respectable Old Gentleman, to
whom stations were stations, neither more nor less. Euston was her
terminus for Thatch Lane; and on the many occasions that Stuart had
accompanied her thither, they had taken to their hearts the grim
portals and endless echoing approach, the labyrinth of platform and
grey mystery of booking-hall, the infinite possibilities in its
stretching regions and sinister corners. Very much less than station,
when their whim was to treat it as a nursery of toys; and how much
more than station, when its oppressive personality foredoomed it as
a backcloth for the day when their mood should be of tragedy. Peter
and Stuart viewed Euston with respect; but regarded it nevertheless
as theirs by virtue of understanding, a kingdom into which even Merle
could not stray.

In the balancing whereof--for Stuart was careful to dole even kingdoms
and secrets with perfect equality and fairness--he and Merle were
both Insiders of society, permitting them likewise to be Truants from
society; a privilege Peter lacked, in that one cannot play truant
from a stage one has never entered. But society, rumour-fed that the
charming granddaughter of Madame des Essarts, and Heron, the fabulously
wealthy young diamond-merchant, were of late to be seen frequently in
company one of the other, society did approve of this most desirable
union; and, furthermore, did seek to forward it by a system known as
“throwing-together.” Merle and Stuart, meeting on the area-steps and by
the back-doors of society, had no desire whatsoever for propinquity of
the hall-portals and front drawing-room; so that Merle received with
polite indifference the tidings that Stuart was to be present at some
glittering function; and Stuart went so far as to refuse invitations
to dinner-parties, carefully prepared with a view to placing him at
Merle’s side during three solid hours of mastication.

Heron and des Essarts; riches and family; youth and beauty; it
was an alliance altogether too suitable, and the parties involved
felt it their bounden duty not to give it visible encouragement.
“I--will--not--have you made easy for me,” Stuart muttered in his most
clenched voice. Truants of society both, they enjoyed their truancy as
much for what they left behind, as for what they went to seek.

Peter smiled sometimes, as she reflected how little of sordid niggling
money worries, of harassing debts, of the snatching hour-to-hour
existence that went on in the Bohemian underworld, was known to those
who have a sufficiency of baths, and travel first-class as a matter of
course. Perversely enough, she hugged to herself the memory of the
few years she had spent on the border-line between respectability and
squalor; was glad they were hers alone, unshared by Merle or Stuart.
Her one-world! ... had they each a one-world, she mused, as well as
their two-world and their three-world?

She and Merle had not as yet succeeded in locating the heel of their
Achilles. Stuart was hard and ruthless, that they had agreed in their
many confabulations on the subject; quite without sympathy for weakness
or sentiment of any kind. But signs had betrayed a vulnerable spot in
him, tantalizingly indicated, vanished as soon as they attempted to
follow up the trail. Childish he certainly was at times. Childish in
the quick look he was wont to throw, angling for approbation, after the
successful performance of what they were pleased to term a “stunt.”
Childishly annoyed at any reference on their part to the kingdom as it
stood before he entered it. Childishly petulant on an occasion when
the girls took him adventuring in a part of the world unfamiliar to
him, so that initiative fell for once into their hands. Childishly
ill-mannered on another occasion, when Peter, partly in the spirit of
mischief, sought to make a quartette of trio by the introduction of
a new discovery in the male line. Then Stuart, even as he had done
previously with Mark St. Quentin, uprose mightily in his wrath, and
hurled the unoffending youth from the topmost battlements into the moat
of blackness. Whereat the girls gave their officious Prætorian clearly
to understand that with them alone lay the orders for entrance and
ejection:

“You were disgustingly rude. You were worse; you hurt his
feelings!----” A furiously indignant Merle, ivory burning to rose, eyes
storm-grey. “You hurt him,” she repeated.

“It’s not a serious wound,” thus the culprit, coolly. “You shall go and
put balm upon it, Merle. I believe you keep a balm factory for applying
relief to the endless victims of my ‘disgusting rudeness.’” He loved
to tease Merle, who was soft-hearted.

“It sounds like margarine,” she cried, in distasteful reference to the
balm. And the incident closed on a laugh.

But childishness was not weakness; nor could it account for those
moments when he seemed mutely to plead to them for something. And then
the memory would be swept away in a gale of swagger, loud crows of
self-approval,--accompanied always by a twinkle in the unwindowed eye,
that plainly betrayed amused knowledge of his own effrontery.

“Just where Stuart suffers,” remarked Peter to Merle, in a spasm of
illumination, “is that his wings of swank will always be attributed to
the uplifting effects of his money-bags, and condemned accordingly.
Whereas I’m perfectly certain that without a penny he would still
remain as magnificently and serenely confident. It’s in him, not in his
pockets. But he’ll never get a chance to prove it. And he wears himself
out in the invention of opportunities to wear himself out.”

“The qualities of a Stoic rotting in the bosom of a millionaire,”
reflected the other girl. “He’s rather a dear,” she added with sudden
inconsequence.

Peter surveyed her quizzically: “Quite sound as yet, are you? No bones
broken?”

Merle felt herself: “Heart all
right--thighs--ankles--shoulder-blades----Yes, thanks, I’m perfectly
sound and rather happy. How are you?” politely.

Thus theirs was the advantage, to be able to make of him a subject
for discussion. Stuart knew no such relief. His search for truth in
this double she-encounter had of necessity to be a solitary quest. Nor
did his previous she-encounters assist him one whit. He could rely on
Merle and Peter to be thoroughly loyal to one another, and unblushingly
disloyal towards him, which was baffling, by way of a beginning. They
showed far cleverer than the sirens who had previously essayed to
lure his boat to destruction, save when he sought to compare them
with females renownedly intellectual, when by sheer perversity, the
two would present themselves to his mental conception as capriciously
feminine, exasperating in their swift changes of mood, in their demands
upon him for the impossible, in their conscious and provoking mystery.
No space of time to analyse them individually as separate Sphinxes for
his unravelling. As yet they were still an undivided problem.

He knew they kept guarded and intact their innermost chambers of
all. Well--did he not also retain his one-world? A world in which
dwelt Stuart the metaphysician, who, stronger even than Stuart the
leprechaun, recognized with dismay an ability to slip out of the trio
and its pattern, its march-rhythm and its corkscrew wit; get glimpses
of himself as a bit of a fool; of the whole edifice they had raised,
as absurd, exaggerated; doubting whether such close comradeship with
two girls, save with the outlook and excuse of pure masculinity, did
not contain an element--yes, though he loathed the term, an element of
the fantastic? In fact, when he could add himself to the collection
that was to be left to the nation. But he limited these glimpses, as
being contrary to the rules of the game; would have denied them himself
altogether, had he not been convinced they added to the fun,--the fun
of scrambling back, aware he had been outside, a truant from truancy!
The metaphysician went in fear that the leprechaun would one day lose
his scrambling abilities; that the intellect would predominate over
the sense of worlds beyond the reach of facts. The metaphysician was
wistfully envious of the leprechaun, who continued to kick up his heels
in despite of disapproval.

There likewise dwelt in the one-world a Stuart Heron known to college
friends, such as Oliver Strachey, who remembered him as the finest
classical scholar of his year; and other men viewing him solely in the
light of a keen sportsman; a fellow good to knock about with; not much
of a talker; inclined to be a bit shattering and explosive at times,
but apologizing for these ebullitions by a great excess of heartiness
afterwards; excess indeed, for Stuart was apt to over-emphasize his
normality.

Remained Heron the diamond-merchant, who was perhaps
negligible--perhaps also not.

       *       *       *       *       *

April this year had stolen some of June’s warm gold, so that devotees
of the river could for once pay homage to tender mist of green, and
mating bird-song. The trio had been afloat since early hours, before
the sun had yet drunk all the diamond dew from the cobwebs, and Peter
more than once apologized to Stuart for the continual reminders of his
trade that sparkled from every grass-blade, every opening leaf.

Their boat had pushed first into all the locks, and shot first out,
nose thrust between the slowly widening gates. They had discovered an
island above the broken glinting shoulder of a weir; and, annexing
it for their own, played Swiss Family Robinson thereon, with great
contentment, save for some slight argument concerning the parts:
“Little Franz for me,” Peter declared, “because of the rides. Whatever
wild animal they catch, be it ostrich or donkey or tortoise, Arab steed
or earwig, there’s always ‘just room for our little Franz upon its
back.’ Franz has an easy time of it. His father makes him a quiverful
of arrows, and ‘off he trots, looking like a Cupid,’ That’s me. Stuart,
you shall be the father.”

“I’ve no vocation for impromptu sermons on the goodness of Heaven in
permitting our pigs to find truffles,” retorted Stuart. “And I want to
be ‘my wilful headstrong Fritz.’ Merle shall be father--_and_ mother.”

Merle demurred. They always cast her for the “mother” parts, she
complained, simply because her hair chose to remain tidier than other
people’s. At which thrust, Peter renounced the entire game, and decided
she wanted to play at hounds-among-the-undergrowth. Her companions
looked puzzled.

“‘The Hound of the d’Urbervilles’? Sleuth-hounds? Hounds of Low?
of Ditch? Hounds of Heaven? Or just Faithful Hounds? Peter, please
specify, and I might even play at being just one tiny little puppy
bloodhound myself.”

In the end Stuart was the entire pack, and Master of the Hounds to
boot. And then they abandoned this new sport in favour of the Spanish
Armada; sailed ignited fireships down a backwater, and roused volumes
of sputtering and inarticulate wrath in the bosom of a mild man of
peace whose skiff they had almost set in flames.

Now, subdued to a more twilit mood, they lie dark against the quenched
amber and pearl of the sunset; and reviewing their April day, they
find it good. Stuart, in ostentatious proof that he needs no rest from
his Herculean labours with the pole, has allowed Peter to recline
full-length in the punt, her head upon his knees, the while she
lazily smokes a cigarette, and complains that his bones penetrate the
thickness of four cushions, and hurt the back of her neck.

“Which proves that you are a Princess by birth,” laughs Merle,
squatting, a graceful Dryad, on the adjoining bank. “You remember the
incident of the pea under the twelve mattresses?”

And now it is that Peter solemnly propounds the question, as to whether
(_a_) consciousness of swank and swagger, and (_b_) consciousness
of the irritation produced in others by swank and swagger, could or
could not be held as mitigating circumstances for aforesaid swank and
swagger?

“Mitigating circumstances? No, I think not,” thoughtfully Merle
raises a dusky purple grape to her crimson lips. The colour-scheme
thus presented might have been one of Dulac’s exotic harmonies:
blue-green shadow of the Quarry Woods behind; vivid blue jersey; bluish
lights in the dense black of her hair. “I should rather say that the
consciousness makes one accessory before the fact.”

Stuart joins in; “The form of the question might be altered to this:
does my personality justify my swank?” impishly he grins down on the
upturned face of Peter across his knees. He is very unlike a man at
these minutes; gnome, pixie or hobgoblin might claim him brother.

Peter retorts: “That’s a different thing altogether. And why limit the
problem to yourself? I was talking generally.”

“Deceive not thyself, my child. A long and careful study of the
differences between male and female intellect has finally convinced me
that the latter is incapable of generalities, of completely impersonal
discussion. Follow the wriggling rivers of her speech backwards to
their source, and you will discover the Subjective Sea. But do you
know,” with renewed earnestness; “I believe my personality _does_
justify my swank. Otherwise you wouldn’t put up with me as you do. And
if it justifies my swank, then my swank is non-existent. Swank is a
thing which proceeds from a misconception of one’s status.”

“Is his swank non-existent?” murmurs Merle to the swimming atoms in a
last slanting sunray; “Oh, I trow not.”

“‘Swagger’ is slightly different again.” Stuart is enjoying himself
immensely. “It is the outward and visible manifestation of the swank
that resides in the soul. The ‘agger’ in fact. But your question
respecting the mitigating circumstances of our consciousness thereof,
is rot, my dear Peter. Because swagger _is_ consciousness, to start
with. Shall we paddle her home, Merle?”

The haze of evening has crept up, white-footed, from the south. A Dryad
moves from the bank, seats herself beside a Faun. The rhythmic dip and
swirl of their paddles dies away into silence.

       *       *       *       *       *

... And the pride of them was like wind sweeping through the hair;
pride in their ability to maintain without disaster this strangely
exhilarating friendship of one and two; flaunt it in the very face of
the Inevitable.




CHAPTER V

DIAMONDS ARE TRUMPS


“I want to go a-maying,” Peter announced. Nor was her ardour abated
when Merle reminded her that April was still in its heyday.

“That makes no difference if the spirit of May-day be in me. The
weather is a sheer intoxication, and calls for revelry. It’s not your
birthday by any chance, is it?”

“If you can wait three weeks----”

“I can’t! I can’t! I want to go a-maying.”

Merle looked at her helplessly. “But one doesn’t go a-maying in Regent
Street,” she protested; “if you mean garlands and queens. I’ll crown
you with hawthorn from Gerrard’s, if you insist, but the expense will
be enormous. Or we’ll catch a cart-horse and plait its tail with red,
white, and blue. _Or_ I’ll treat you to an ice-cream soda at Fuller’s.
You can choose between these rural delights.”

“Where’s Stuart?” Peter demanded suddenly. “I haven’t seen or heard
of him for about a week.” One of Stuart’s habits was the treatment of
each curt farewell as final, leaving his companions in a pleasant state
of uncertainty as to his next summons to fellowship. “Where’s Stuart?
P’raps it’s _his_ birthday. ’Tisn’t mine, I know. Merle, what do you
say to a grand un-birthday festival? Stuart shall take us into the
country to toss cowslip balls. We’ll rout him out from his Aladdin’s
Cave. Who wants diamonds in springtime, in springtime----”

“‘The only pretty ring-time,’” Merle added. “So you’re wrong about the
diamonds.”

“We’ll go and look at his pretty rings.” Peter hesitated, came to a
full-stop opposite one of Liberty’s windows, a tawny riot of gold and
amber and copper tints. “Perhaps we’d better not,” she decided; “I hate
the sort of female who can’t leave a man alone in business hours. And I
hate still more the ponderous business face with which he receives her
pretty importunities.”

“But Stuart!” laughed Merle. “You can surely trust Stuart enough to
believe there is no City-spell on earth can hold him captive. Besides,
he begged us to invade his premises one day and see him play at
diamond-merchants. Don’t you remember?”

“In a silk hat; so he did. Come along then.” Peter wavered no longer,
but hailed a Holborn ’bus, and followed by Merle, scrambled to the top.
She was right about the weather: the warm air was a-stir with lilac
promise, and passing faces gave evidence of spring-cleaning within, a
more potent and magical spring-cleaning than ever achieved by mop and
broom.

“I feel about six and a half,” Merle confessed gaily, as with a
delighted sense of exploration they spelt out “Heron and Carr,
Diamond-merchants, first floor,” among a bewilderment of brass plates,
and mounted lightly the wide stone staircase.

“We want Mr. Stuart Heron, please,” to the office boy who answered
their summons; and again, “We want Mr. Stuart Heron,” as a preoccupied
clerk came slowly forward.

“Mr. Stuart?” The man looked reluctant. “Is it important?”

“Awfully important,” said Peter gravely. She was wondering what would
be the man’s attitude if she explained that the youngest partner of the
house was required for the purposes of an un-birthday celebration.

They were conducted through two or three apartments, containing nothing
more thrilling than cupboards and clerks, so that Merle assumed the
jewels were kept in glittering caverns below; and then ushered into an
anteroom, formal and luxurious, in which were already seated several
applicants for royal favour, grave men and grey, all.

“I think Mr. Stuart is engaged. What name shall I say?” The
confidential clerk appeared curiously disapproving of their presence.

“Got your card-case, Merle?”

Of course Merle had her card-case. And a card. And white kid gloves
with which to present it. More than could be said for Peter.

Their guide withdrew, having first motioned the girls to deep leather
arm-chairs, into which they sank and were obliterated. The silence of
the room became thick and muffled. A clock ticked ponderously from
the chimney-piece. The assembled veterans made no sound, with the
exception of one who played nervously with his feet, advancing these by
slow stages towards one another, and then scurrying them apart, as if
fearful of being caught in the act. Peter watched him, fascinated. It
was fully ten minutes before hurried steps approached the door....

       *       *       *       *       *

There had been changes in the firm of Heron and Carr since Stuart
entered it, three years before. Uncle Arthur had embraced the
opportunity to retire from business. Derwent Heron was growing old, and
absented himself frequently from the office: Baldwin--well, Baldwin
at the best of times was useful mostly as an ornament. Thus it befell
that a great deal of responsibility fell on the shoulders of the new
partner. Nor was Stuart averse to this. He was right when he said that
a game lost its value unless played in all seriousness. On the whole he
made few mistakes, though his lucky star ran the risk, from overwork,
of becoming somewhat frayed at the edges. Frequently he deplored the
difficulty of truly reckless gambling, with that officious orbit
fore-dooming him ever to success. Of late, certain events had decided
him to buy in a vast amount of stock, giving mostly bills in exchange.
Then, like a bolt from the blue, one Antoine Gobert, from Venezuela,
made his sensational announcement: no less than the discovery of a
cheap preparation for the making of diamonds. The days following this
revelation were fraught with the greatest strain to the merchants in
the trade. It was generally acknowledged that in the case of Heron
and Carr the crash consequent upon proof of Gobert’s integrity would
resound loudest. It was unlucky for the youngest diamond-merchant
in London that he should have been buying in with such rapidity and
vigour. His elders shook their grey heads over Stuart, but consulted
him notwithstanding, in this period of crisis; an unconscious tribute
to certain brilliant strokes made by the firm within the past three
years.

Gobert, having flung his bombshell, did not seem inclined to part too
easily with the mysteries of his prescription. Rumour was busy, and
prices fluctuated wildly. With difficulty was a panic averted. Stuart
firmly declared the magician a fraud; continued to assert it contrary
to the opinions of the majority, older men, men of deep experience.
It was felt that some decisive step would have to be taken, before
Gobert should make newspaper babble of his secret. Already journalism
was on the scent; and once known, the romance of the thing would
cause it to be gobbled greedily by the public. So the wizard was
approached; discreetly sounded; finally, an offer made to him by Sir
Fergus Macpherson, of the firm of Grey, Macpherson and Sons, well-known
diamond-merchants. An offer of twenty thousand pounds for the purpose
of private experiment; a slip of paper, containing the exact
ingredients of the manufacture, to be placed, in token of good faith,
at the Bank of England. Gobert refused twenty thousand pounds. Not
enough. Fifty thousand then? So be it, fifty thousand. The money was
paid over, and the experiments started. Then, somehow a doubt of Gobert
arose and grew. And that very day, April the 16th, it was finally
decided that the envelope was to be opened, the miracle laid bare. If
genuine--so much the worse for dealers in diamonds; so much the worse
for Stuart Heron in particular. The issue would not have loomed in his
eyes so stupendous, were it not that he felt his credit with Derwent
and Arthur at stake. The firm had relied on his judgment. So that,
sitting in earnest consultation with Sir Fergus and a certain Rupert
Rosenstein, his mouth was set in sterner lines than his age warranted,
and a deep frown lay between his eyebrows.

“Well, in that case, Sir Fergus----”

The confidential clerk entered noiselessly, and handed him a card:
‘Miss Merle des Essarts.’

“Here?”

“Two young ladies, Mr. Heron. Said it was important.”

“Oh--very well. Say that I’m coming at once.”

But it was several minutes before Sir Fergus rose to take leave.
And then there were so many matters that clamoured for his brain’s
attention; all overshadowed by a persistently recurring vision of a
factory ... ten factories ... a thousand factories; men working; swarms
of busy little figures; myriads of tiny white crystals the result of
their labours,--the result of a few lines of writing that awaited the
evening’s examination. Glittering crystals, produced in such quantities
as to flood the universe like dewfall ... pretty little crystals, but
utterly valueless.

Stuart straightened his shoulders. No good anticipating the worst.
He opened the door of the anteroom: “Ah, Digby, I wanted to see
you,”--and he of the wandering feet looked gratified.

Peter and Merle were waiting, rather impatiently, at the far end of
the apartment. Some of their April joyousness had been swamped by the
oppressive atmosphere surrounding them. The sunshine, creeping through
the heavily curtained window, was merely metallic here. So that they
greeted Stuart with relief.

“The face is perfect,” laughed Peter. “All we expected, and more. And
now please take it off. Or is it merely semi-detached?”

Stuart did not reply. Nor was there perceptible alteration in his
demeanour. But Peter was too amused by his garments of black decorum,
to note that to-day they were something more than skin-deep.

“But, oh, Stuart, where’s the hat? You promised us the hat! Don’t say
you’ve left it in the hall?”

He turned to Merle; and though he spoke courteously, his thoughts
seemed very far away.

“My clerk told me it was important. Are you in any trouble? Or--can
I?”--he hesitated, obviously waiting an excuse for their presence. And
Merle’s cheeks began to burn.

“We--it isn’t really important,” she faltered. “I only--we thought----”
oh, to be safely down the steps and out in the street! How could she
say to this stranger: “We wanted you to come a-maying because it is
April.” The thrill of primroses in the air had dwindled to a pin-point
of triviality.

“We wondered whether you would care to join us for a day in the
country,” she finished at last, lamely.

“I’m sorry. I’m afraid it’s quite out of the question to-day.” He
appeared to realize dimly that something more was expected of him. His
eye fell on Digby, eager for attention. The confidential clerk entered:
“You’re wanted on the telephone, sir. Mr. Grey.” “All right, Lewis; ask
him to hold the line,” alert response now in his voice; and he had
already turned to the door, when he remembered his visitors. “We must
be going,” said Merle quickly. He looked relieved. “Ah, then you’ll
excuse me, I know. We’re rather rushed. Would you care to have a look
round the place?”--he signalled to Lewis to wait, in case his services
should be required as cicerone. “There’s nothing much to see, though.
No treasure-vaults,” with a groping attempt to resume the language of
which he had so patently mislaid the cipher.

And Merle, likewise clutching at her rags of self-respect, responded
with a forced laugh: “You don’t make the diamonds, then?”

“No,” Stuart’s tones were somewhat grim. “We don’t make the diamonds.”
He paused. Then, with a quick “Good-bye,” went to answer the telephone
summons. “I’ll see you directly, Digby,” thrown out on his way to the
door. Baldwin Carr appeared at another entrance: “Has Macpherson gone,
Stuart? Derwent wanted to speak to you----” “Right! when I’ve polished
off Grey.” What _was_ the matter with all these men, that the wrinkle
lay so deep between their eyebrows?

Baldwin glanced in some surprise at the figures of Peter and Merle,
standing irresolutely by the window. Then returned to his private
office.

The confidential clerk showed them out. A swinging door presented
them with a snatch of telephonic conversation: “Yes, it’s Mr. Stuart
Heron--Yes--No, not till to-night, nothing definite--we think----” The
door swung to, cutting off the rest.

On the stone steps, they came face to face with a little shrivelled
man, head cocked to one side; Arthur Heron, had they known it; rat
about to rejoin the sinking ship.

Out in the push and clamour of Holborn, Merle drew a long breath, put
both hands up to her hot face: “I wonder if I shall ever grow cool
again,” she said, rather tremulously. And: “I suppose we’ve made rather
fools of ourselves.”

“Don’t!” gasped Peter. Every time she recalled the blank look which
had received her first eager speeches it was as if someone had
dealt her a blow in the face. Oh, the stinging ignominy which lay
in the remembrance of Merle and herself, two blushing incoherent
little--idiots, intruding with froth and futility into the world of
real things, solid things, things that matter, world of men. And Stuart
could so easily have averted humiliation from their heads: one look,
one word, to prove his recollection of the thousand intimacies that had
lain between them.--“A day in the country ... I’m sorry--_Sorry!_” She
ejaculated the word aloud in accents of such furious scorn, that Merle
looked round startled. He should be sorrier still, soon! His fault,
every bit; not for ejecting them, but for ever having dared invite
them--to meet with that.

With a sense of rawness that cried out for solitude, Peter suddenly
bade Merle good-bye:

“I’m going home. Do you mind?”

And sorrowful for the mood of April so rudely shattered, Merle shook
her head and passed on.




CHAPTER VI

MERLE


Thus Merle’s evening at Lancaster Gate was doomed to be a solitary one.
For Madame des Essarts had sallied forth, in diamonds and dignity, to a
banquet celebrating the arrival in office of a new Greek minister. The
handsome old lady, with her social talents, her knowledge of foreign
languages, her dainty pointed wit, the aura of martyrdom which clung
to her enforced exile from the hated Republic of France--to which she
could return whenever she pleased--was of the type that had, in ruffled
and beruffled days, swayed kings and unmade ministers. Perhaps the
secret of her lost art lay in the fact that she never for one moment
forgot she was dealing with men, nor let them forget that she regarded
them as such, lords and puppets. Not for Antoinette des Essarts the
cheery comradeship, the quick sexless sympathy, the contempt of
cajolery and intrigue, which distinguished the generation among which
she now moved. And perhaps from her had come that ultra-feminine streak
in Merle that expressed itself in the girl’s attitude towards Stuart;
something which held out an involuntary hand for support, yet shrank,
at once disdainful and startled, from too rough-and-ready an intimacy;
even though, with Peter, she might rejoice at what she deemed the
whole-hearted freedom of the trio.

In her soft gown of _eau-de-nil_--for who, argues Madame des Essarts,
who of the noblesse would appear by evening light save in silk attire
and satin slipper?--she dined in lonely state; seated at one end of
vast acres of dinner-table, with ever at her elbow a silent personage
bearing the chef’s latest inspiration. Peter should by invitation have
been keeping her company this night, and making exceeding merry over
the ceremonial repast. And, it may be for the fiftieth time in the past
two years, Merle des Essarts breathed devout thanks to the laughing
young adventuress, who had brought her from regarding as unalterable
essentials _eau-de-nil_ and a French chef, Watteau and ambassadors, all
the incidentals of Merle’s quaintly formal setting, to the point of
view that these were mere delightful ingredients in an ever-changing
game of play; one costume, vastly becoming indeed, among a million in
masquerade.

Yet to-night, lacking Peter, some of the old wistful regrets touched
Merle with chilly fingers; followed her with ghostly trip into the
little boudoir, grey and primrose, Lancret looped medallion-wise
into the overmantel; whispered in lisping voices of a day that might
possibly come when Dresden, with ribboned crook for sceptre, should
again reign supreme in her life; pointed in light mockery to a picture
that adorned the wall: Merle herself, aged eight, standing stiffly
posed beside a sundial; hands busy with the ivory sticks of a painted
fan; toes primly turned outwards; smooth, dark curls; high-waisted pink
frock. One moment fixed indelibly to symbolize a whole childhood. And
with whatever passionate zest she might play now, Merle knew, and hotly
resented, that she could not make up for her cheated years of château
and convent, of solitude and decorum and _il-ne-faut-pas_. To be sure,
the latter phrase did not need to be said often; _la petite_ Merle and
her brother Fernand had been ever ‘_bien sage lui; et elle, un vrai
petit ange_.’ Of course she had! Who had taught her otherwise, before
her twentieth birthday?

... An April shower of rain swept the panes, glowing sapphire-dark
behind their primrose hangings. A musical pattering shower, unreal as a
lit boudoir and a girl’s dreams....

       *       *       *       *       *

--Crash! and an exquisite china clock lay shattered on the ground. A
thin little chap, with freckled impertinent nose and pointed ears,
looked up, startled, as Merle hastened to the rescue: “Couldn’t help
it; just wanted to see how it took to pieces.”...

With wild hurrahs, a tangle of long legs and flying skirts whizzed down
the banisters and landed in a heap at the foot.

Something delightful and sturdy, with dark red hair and blown-out
cheeks, was marching to and fro on the polished drawing-room floor,
waving flags and shouting....

Thus Merle drew from the Land of Corners, shadowy corners of the old
house, dim unswept corners in her brain, dog-eared corners of forgotten
picture-books, a whole host of children; ordinary, healthy, grubby
youngsters, who would reduce the silent beautiful rooms to their proper
state of scrum and chaos. Above all, naughty children; she collected
the warm cosy naughtinesses that has never been hers; gloated over
each separate deed of infamy; as if in offering to the prim sad-eyed
daintily clothed image on the wall.

... Dick was for ever robbing orchards and being chased by irate
farmers. But then how could he help it, this eldest son of hers, just
entering that close-cropped hobnailed condition that betokens the
schoolboy? And Merle liked to see his rough bullet-head buried in her
lap, in moods of half-sullen contrition; would have kept it permanently
there, had Dick been willing. Which he wasn’t.

... Nobody-loves-me came wandering in from the garden. Nobody-loves-me
was the ugly duckling, of whom visitors were wont to say: “Never mind,
my dear; the Ugly Duckling grew to be a swan, you know,” a prophecy
which comforted the sufferer not a whit. She was given to brooding,
this particular infant; and possessed, in addition, Bad Habits: Bad
Habits, such as Biting Her Nails. And, suddenly aware of the Bitten
Nails, Merle generously handed over Nobody-loves-me to Peter, who lived
next door, and who could therefore be freely endowed with undesirable
progeny, “because anyway,” reflected Merle, “they couldn’t all be
mine.” And Dick and the Boy-girl, ringleaders both, kept her hands
pretty full. Boy-girl it was who erstwhile slid the banisters; she,
who climbed trees, and made ladders in her stockings--such as no young
lady should--and blarneyed the cook; and once, by way of an experiment,
cut short not only her own mane of hair, but also the straggly crop
of Nobody-loves-me. The incarnation of swift and mischievous daring,
Boy-girl; but who could be angry with her long, when she brought her
coaxing Irish charm to bear on the situation?

--Why Irish? Merle was not quite sure. She knew only that it was,
undeniably, Irish charm. And finally solved the riddle by making the
(shadowy) father of this swarming brood, a son of Erin.

The little-mother-to-her-sisters-and-brothers, gentle, smooth-haired
and fond of her needle, to be found in every well-regulated family,
Merle, on consideration, also presented as a free gift to Peter. Her
own unacknowledged favourite was the funny little beggar with the
puck-like ears, three-cornered nostrils set to catch the rain, and
scientific mind; which latter prompted him invariably to take articles
to pieces for the sake of seeing how they worked. And they never worked
again. There were many, many costly rarities in the house, Merle
remembered happily, that literally asked for his attentions.

Or did she after all more tenderly incline to the delicate child with
clustering pale-gold hair? who nervously refused to sleep without a
night-light; who believed in fairies, and cherished all sorts of quaint
fanciful notions about the little angels--Merle pulled herself up
with a start, realizing that here she had in wanton enjoyment created
a veritable chee-ild! Unable to slaughter in cold blood anything so
lately born, she compromised by ... giving it to Peter. For anyhow (in
guilty argument) Peter’s hair was of that peculiar pale-gold tint, and
what more natural than that her offspring should inherit it?

Tumultuously alive now, all these ordinary healthy grubby youngsters;
making walls within and sky without, resound with their whoops and
coo-ees. A turbulent out-of-hand crew--Merle is rather afraid she is
lacking in Proper Authority; in the balancing whereof, she endows the
(shadowy) father with a “firm hand over the children,” in addition to
his Irish birth and other excellent qualities.

A few stray naughtinesses yet to be collected from chimney-corner and
rafter and cellar; such as leaving all doors open,--except, in swift
amendment, when Dick rather chooses to bang them. Somebody, probably
the gardener, lodges a complaint that “they chairs be rotted through
again, left h’out all night in the damp.” And Nurse says it isn’t her
fault that the young ladies and gentlemen won’t eat vegetables, since
they will persist in stuffing chocolate just before their dinner; and
Merle has much ado not to laugh, knowing, via some subtle instinct,
that every secret opportunity is embraced to thrust tapioca, crusts,
and spinach into the crevice between walls and cupboard; accumulated
results only to be discovered at Spring-cleaning.

... Boy-girl dashes in to demand material for “dressing-up”; already
she has helped herself pretty liberally; the polite request is an
afterthought. The nurseries overflow with messy pets--nor does Puck
ever remember to feed his guinea-pig. Nobody-loves-me has run away,
for the third time in a fortnight, because the others don’t want her
to play with them. His sailor-suit very green and wet and messy from
an afternoon’s fishing in the pond, Copper-curls (his brothers call
him Carrots) stumbles into the boudoir, trailing behind him tackle and
weed and worm on the pale grey carpet. Drowsily he cuddles his firm
little body against Merle’s _eau-de-nil_; slips a very hot hand between
her cool fingers; droops his mouth to the semblance of a celestial
choir-boy’s--so that she knows he has been very, very wicked, and
requires forgiveness and absolution.

And now Stuart is standing before her, eyes full of trouble ... and the
children tumble in quick confusion back to the Land of Corners....

       *       *       *       *       *

Bewildered, Merle rubbed her eyes: “I didn’t hear you come in”; the
door had been open, and the thick velvet pile a muffler to approaching
footsteps.

“Merle, am I going to be hurled from the battlements, for failing to
observe the divinity of play?”

She made no reply, not quite sure whether his mood be not of mockery.
And suddenly, with a quick and--for him--rather clumsy movement, he
dropped onto his knees beside her chair, buried his head deep in her
lap; so that it almost seemed as if Dick ... Merle let her fingers
stray, half-fearfully, among the rebellion of rough brown hair. For in
the blur of twilight and dreams and pattering rain, she could not as
yet entirely separate her phantom visitants from the real ones.

“Why, your coat is wet.” She bent forward to light the gas-fire in the
grate. And with a gulp and a leap, the room was warm with a multitude
of tiny blue tongues, licking and panting through their skull-like
rings.

“I’ve been walking since five o’clock.” He was silent for a moment.
Then it came out, not in a grateful unburdening torrent, but in wrung
jerky sentences, of which the last caught up and contained the whole
hidden cause of pain:

“I was grown-up--didn’t hear the call ... and I wasn’t even aware of
it.”

Something wrong here which lay too deep for her understanding. Merle
asked no questions; content to dry his coat; touch lingeringly his hair
and shoulders; give him the comfort she dimly felt he most needed.

“It didn’t matter, dear.”

“You’re not going to shut me out, you and Peter?”

“We couldn’t do without you, Stuart.”

“Thank you.” A tightness in his voice seemed to have snapped at her
tender assurance. His fingers, which had gripped and twisted at hers
till she could have cried out with the pain, now slackened their
pressure. For the moment, the girl had succeeded in exorcising the
demons which were so strangely tormenting his soul.

       *       *       *       *       *

... A hush in the room. A hush so profound, that two little figures
stirred restlessly in their corner, came tip-toeing hand-in-hand
towards the door of the boudoir. But----

“It’s no good,” whispered Nobody-loves-me, as she tugged Puck
backwards. “He’s still there.”...

       *       *       *       *       *

Stuart looked up suddenly: “‘Wherefore to wait my pleasure, I put my
Spring aside....’ I always knew it would be damnably easy--to slip
beyond the pattern and never get back....” The demons were again at
work within him. If only they would leave him in peace, just for a
moment, mind and body.

“Stuart, don’t you ever get tired?” she cried pitifully.

He muttered: “Dead tired,” and closing his eyes, allowed himself
to relax entirely to her comforting touch, the soft coolness of her
presence; as if establishing the memory of a second against which, in
future turmoil and stress, he might lay his cheek, and find rest.

“Merle.”

“Yes, dear?”

He said nothing, but still pleaded; and bending down her face to his,
she found their lips clinging together.

After he had gone, Merle sat awhile, wondering how much of what had
passed must be told to Peter. Loyalty, and the compact they had made:
whatever happened, to keep the path unblocked between them, demanded an
exact account of events. But that compact had been formed in alliance
against a hard and ruthless Stuart of their imaginings. Her instincts
were all to protect the boy who had come to her in his trouble. He
had come to her--the thought was charged with sweetness. And here she
experienced a pang of pity for the girl, the other girl, who looked
like being the one left out. But Peter’s anger at the morning’s episode
had been hot; she would not have known how to handle him with the
gloves his soreness demanded. Peter didn’t like gloves.

... For an instant, Merle contemplated treachery.

No. It was popularly supposed that two girls couldn’t be square
with one another, where a man was in question. Hers to disprove the
theory. A secret unshared by Peter would, moreover, be an insult to
the spirit of the trio; the first menace to its continued existence.
Merle hesitated no longer, but sat down at the escritoire, and wrote
her letter; a letter which omitted nothing, not even the final
embrace--though she winced at the thought that Peter might possibly
misconstrue it to something more of man and woman, less of child. Then
she rang the bell and gave orders for the missive to be taken at once
to the post.

... Up the hushed staircase, and into the vast shadowy bedroom.
Had Stuart’s head really lain on her lap? Or was he but one of the
fantastic crowd who had been abroad that night in Lancaster Gate;
sliding the banisters, playing hide-and-seek in the passages, smashing
the china--while the white-haired châtelaine of the house took wine
with the King of the Hellenes’ minister.




CHAPTER VII

PETER


On reaching home, Stuart found Baldwin Carr awaiting him in the
dining-room.

“Hullo! you’re a late visitor.”

“I thought you’d want to know,” said Baldwin, from whose brow the
unwonted lines of anxiety had now been ironed away. “The whole business
was a fake--and Gobert has vanished off the face of the earth.”

This was sensational. Stuart helped himself to a whisky and soda.

“What do you mean by fake? the envelope----”

“Empty, my boy. Blank bit of paper, that’s all. Jove! you should
have seen the faces when it was opened. Old Rosenstein! Of course we
smelt a rat, and sent round to Monsieur Antoine’s apartments. Not a
sign of him. Left that morning, the landlady said; bag, baggage--and
incidentally, our fifty thousand. Still, compared with what it might
have cost us--well, what do you think of it?”

“I take off my hat to Gobert,” replied the other, with an amused
chuckle; “fifty thou. isn’t too much to pay for the privilege of
acquaintance with the swindler who can rob you of it.”

“Well--ah--I wouldn’t go so far as to say that. Pour me out a stiff
one, Stuart, I’m just about done up. And then I must be off. Wanted
to set your mind at rest first. Where have you been all these hours?
Not that I blame you for bunking,”--Stuart smiled--“the strain was
intolerable. I’d have escaped from the office myself, only I thought it
hardly fair to Derwent.”

Nor did his nephew seek to explain the real goad which had driven him
forth to pace the streets from five o’clock that April afternoon.

Baldwin set down his glass: “Good night----” he paused. Something
like emotion shook his voice. “We’ve pulled through,” he said. And
Stuart, knowing the other was only recalled from adding: “we Herons,”
by a consideration of facts, composed his face to lines befitting the
occasion, and solemnly grasped the extended hand. Baldwin’s pulling may
have been of a negative order, but of his pride in firm and family, no
man could remain in doubt.

Stuart fell asleep that night lulled by memory of a sweet tremulous
mouth, and dark eyes, deeply tender; of a blur of _eau-de-nil_ in
a setting of pale primrose and dim grey; of cool fingers quelling
to peace all the hot turbulence that tormented him; of a soft voice
saying: “We can’t do without you, Stuart....”

He awoke next day to the same memory, lashing him with whips of shame.
The deadly panic which had resulted from his conduct of the preceding
morning, panic of clogging with moral and mental fat, his vision of
worlds beyond and his capacity for play, was as nothing compared to
the revolt with which he now viewed his breakdown of the evening: the
brimming to the surface of weak sentiment, to find solace in a girl’s
caresses. Twice--twice in twelve hours to have lost control of himself;
to have taken his hand from the tiller twice; to have twice resigned
stage management to an unseen power, which derided, even while it swung
him from “a sense of business responsibility” to an extreme of maudlin
hysteria. Stuart did not spare himself in terms of abuse. And Merle
had encouraged him to make an exhibition of himself; Merle had lent
a sympathetic ear to his woes; asked no questions; flooded him with
rosy forgiveness. Merle had made it easy for him--easy and comfortable;
dried his coat.... Stuart smouldered and chafed, seeing the incident
pictured in bright colours: “A Little Mother,” and framed on the
nursery wall, valued supplement to a Xmas number.

Why, in Heaven’s name, hadn’t she met him with conflict of some sort;
mockery that might have braced him to action; instead of just allowing
him to--slop. Verb which to Stuart expressed the apex of abomination.

A sense of justice reasserted itself. Merle was charming, no doubt
of it; her response to his appeal a very idyll of fragrance and
simplicity. As for his curt behaviour when the two girls had called on
him in the office, well, Stuart was hardly sorry any more; save when
the leprechaun recognized a glorious opportunity missed: to have proved
himself able to cope with both situations in the appropriate spirit;
with the light-hearted “come out to play,” in the midst of the almost
unbearable tension consequent on the danger threatening the affairs of
Heron and Carr.

--“Couldn’t have devised it better myself,” mused Stuart regretfully,
as he gave Peter’s number to the telephone clerk.

       *       *       *       *       *

Peter sprang out of bed, hearing the postman’s knock; and pattering
barefoot downstairs, she drew from the box, Merle’s letter, in company
of an oblong bill, and an envelope bearing St. Quentin’s by now
familiar handwriting. Then, returning to her room, she seated herself
on the edge of the bed; and, a pale-haired gleaner in the early
sunshine, proceeded to examine her harvest.

The bill contained an intimation to the effect that Mr. Lazarus,
tailor, was amazed that Miss Kyndersley should have ignored his
repeated applications for payment, and could only suppose they had
slipped her memory, as otherwise doubtless, etc.

“I call that a delicate way of putting it,” reflected Peter, with
thoughts all of sunny kindness towards Mr. Lazarus. “He’s trying to
spare my feelings, bless him. He shall have free tickets for dad’s next
pier concert.”

Of paying there could be no question. Peter, true to the traditions
of her caste, never settled her debts till actually threatened by the
law; when she would hastily sell her silver hair-brushes, or borrow
from her aunt, or pledge the half-of-her-next-year-but-one income;
diminutive amount at best, inherited from her dead mother. She also had
what she called her “submerged” periods, when by dint of forswearing
the world for an entire fortnight, and working hard eight hours a day
at colouring art postcards, she scraped together a sufficient sum to
extricate her for a short while from the perpetual webs with which
finance encumbered her pathway. Never yet had she been altogether free
from pecuniary embarrassments; would indeed have missed the background
of their mutterings, as those who have dwelt long by the sea cannot
bear to be deprived of its eternal swish.

Mark St. Quentin, striving to mingle in equal proportions formality
with infatuation, begged leave to visit her at Thatch Lane the
following Sunday. Peter dimpled mischievously; she would wear a white
dress, and playfully beg him to help lay the knives and forks for
supper: “We have only one servant, you see; and treat you as quite
one of the family”--and she dimpled again at the thought of Stuart’s
disgust on anyone treating him as one of any family, anywhere.

Stuart ... a slight contraction of her bare toes, as she remembered how
the said gentleman had incurred her displeasure. She wondered what his
attitude was likely to be. Then opened Merle’s letter--and found out.

Peter raised her head; gazed straight through the window, across garden
and hedge and field, to where the Weald hunched its back against the
sky. But her eyes missed the tender greens and misty blues of the
landscape; could not share in the joy of the house on discovering it at
last owned, after five gloomy months, a clear black shadow to lay upon
the dew-wet grass.

For she was wondering how not to be jealous.

It was not the incident itself which rankled; but recognition of a fact
that long ago had carried its conviction, though only now its results:
Merle was allowed, by the unseen code, to be the more feminine of the
twain. She, Peter, thrust willy-nilly into the bolder, more challenging
position. Was it that she was born with a tilt to her soul, as well as
to her nose and chin? She could not tell. But Stuart, gravitating to
her for all stimulation, had nevertheless gone to Merle for comfort.
And Peter wondered furthermore why she played up so persistently to
the Laughing-Cavalier qualities, with which from the very first he had
chosen to endow her. And, wondering, knew yet that she must continue
boyish and defiant; though she, even as Merle, wanted how much to be
tender to him in his present attire of sackcloth and ashes.

The getting-up gong sounded, and Peter returned to bed.

The breakfast-gong, half an hour later, led her to the bathroom; and
another quite irrelevant gong saw her wrestling with stockings. Only
when the gongs finally ceased from troubling, did she descend to the
dining-room, there to find Aunt Esther deeply immersed in the “Daily
Camera.”

“Peter, just look at these!”

‘These’ were startling pictorial presentments of Antoine Gobert,
the notorious diamond wizard; flanked on the one side by Sir Fergus
Macpherson, looking like a Jew, which he wasn’t; on the other, by an
elderly and speckled Stuart: “youngest partner in the firm of Heron &
Carr.” Below appeared sensational accounts of the shameful fraud which
had been practised, and the scene which took place in a private room of
the Bank of England, at 6.30 p.m. of the previous day, when the bubble
was pricked.

Peter’s lip curled as she read. So that accounted for Stuart’s sudden
mood of contrition. Easy enough to find time for being sorry, after
the cause of anxiety had been removed. It required no Stuart Heron for
that. Nor did she consider that the strain adequately accounted for his
preoccupation of the morning. According to his own standards, he should
be strung up to response at any moment, however inopportune. If he
could be exacting, why, so also could she. Quite cured of her yearnings
towards womanly tenderness, she tossed aside the paper, and helped
herself to eggs and bacon.

“Well, well,” quoth Miss Esther, “I always say that foreigners aren’t
to be trusted; and I’m sure it’s very nice and pleasant to think young
Mr. Heron isn’t going to be a bankrupt after all. Of course he has
rather more money than he knows what to do with; but still, it’s better
in the hands of a gentleman than a rogue. And these things will get in
the papers, and there you are! What can you expect? However, there’s
no harm done; the Bank of England is too wide-awake for that. And,” an
after-thought, “Heaven will punish the swindler, I’ve no doubt.”

Thus having, according to custom, neatly packed away the entire set of
events within her own private and particular boundaries; reduced each
participant, including Heaven and the Bank of England, to a height
convenient for patting on the head, Miss Esther Worthing asked for the
marmalade.

The telephone bell rang. Peter dashed up the stairs, prepared to spurn
still further into the dust the bowed and prostrate figure at the
other end of the wire. Stuart’s cheery greeting, however, did not quite
coincide with her expectations.

“Hullo! That you, Peter ... dear?” almost a sub-current of amusement in
his tone. “What’s the attitude?”

“Bellicose,” was the spirited retort.

“Thought so. It would have been so much less obvious on your part, to
have held out the hand of forgiveness.”

“You want a Briareus of forgiveness, it seems.”

“Oh. So you’ve heard from Merle.”

“Yes.”

Silence for a moment. Then:

“Doesn’t the fact that of my own accord I regained the sense of
things--or rather the nonsense of things, doesn’t it all absolve me
from your wrath?” still that slight mocking inflection. Peter thought
how pleasant it would be to hurt him. Hurt him quite badly.

“Of your own accord?” she flung indignantly into the mouthpiece. “Why,
I’ve seen the papers. Naturally, _after_ your business troubles were
so unexpectedly smoothed out, you had leisure to turn your attention
to--minor matters.”

“As it happened,”--she could not complain now of too light a note
in the icy incision of his speech, “I did not know that the Gobert
thunderbolt had been averted, until I reached home after seeing Merle.”

“You didn’t know?”

“I did not know.”

“The envelope was opened towards half-past six, according to the Press.”

“I believe that’s correct.”

“And Merle writes that you turned up about nine o’clock.”

“To be exact, a quarter to nine.”

“And yet you knew nothing?”

“And yet I knew nothing.”

Their speeches followed each other with the thud and rebound of a swift
rally over the tennis-net.

“The evidence is against you.”

“I’m not on my defence. I merely state facts.”

Peter said very gently: “Do you expect me to believe them?”

“You will--later. At present you are merely laying yourself open to the
unpleasant necessity of apologizing.”

“Apologizing?” she cried, hotly resenting this turning of the tables.
“For what?”

“For calling me a liar.”

“I didn’t use the word.”

“Then use it--now.”

“You’re a liar, Stuart.”

She was unable to tell if his evident anger were assumed or genuine.
But, if the latter, so much the better; she anticipated a pleasurable
excitement from the unexplored territory beyond the limits of his
tolerance.

He was speaking again. And Peter wished he would free his voice from
its straining bonds of control.

“Quite right. I am a liar. A very plausible and rather dangerous liar.
But, quite by accident, in the present instance I happen to be speaking
the truth. When you’ve recovered from your attitude of scepticism, ring
me up. Good-bye.”

Peter went for a walk. She walked hard for a couple of hours; avoided
the plunging soil of pasture-land, in favour of hard country roads,
where her feet met with a ringing resistance. On reaching a village,
six miles distant from Thatch Lane, she entered without hesitation the
local post-office.

... “Hullo!”

“Stuart.”

“Yes?”

“I discard my attitude.”

“From weakness?”

“No. From conviction.”

“Good. Thank you.”

She rang off.

       *       *       *       *       *

In this wise, the trio forfeited their first fine carelessness.
Disintegration was imminent, though none could tell as yet which way
it would manifest itself. Each of their words and actions, however
trivial, took on a certain significance. For Stuart had heard in
Peter’s voice the battle-ring, and tingled to its challenge. For Peter
had known an instant’s jealousy of Merle. For Merle had battled with
the temptation to be disloyal towards Peter. For Stuart had twice in a
day ceased to be master of his moods, and vowed by all his gods these
moods should neither recur again. For Merle cherished the second of
them as a memory sweeter than music. For Merle had been visited by an
old ghost, and by a merry host of new ones. For Peter had definitely
flung her cloak, tossed her plume, donned the disguise which Stuart
mistook for nature. For all these follies and cross-follies are the
outcome of certain fatal desires to go a-maying on a day of April!




CHAPTER VIII

STUART GOES A-STUNTING


The girls knew that Stuart’s next act would be a carefully veiled
apology to the spirit of the trio, for the moment he had been deaf to
its call. Apology that would probably manifest itself in a deed of
unwonted daring, originality and impudence, that none might suspect
it of being an apology; deed which would firmly re-establish in the
eyes of the twain his slightly shaken position. For though with Peter
he had crossed swords in single combat, had known the pleasure of
knocking from her grasp the weapon, the pleasure of stepping back to
allow her to resume it,--not, most certainly, because he was a little
gentleman, but because he preferred her blade in hand; for though
with Merle he had walked awhile in a two-world too softly cushioned
for his taste; yet with these things the spirit of the trio did not
concern itself. Nor was it to be placated save by offering to the
number three. So Peter and Merle were somewhat surprised when Stuart’s
expected fireworks tamely resolved themselves into a verbally conveyed
invitation to spend the first week in May with his elder sister,
married to an owner of vast estates in Devonshire.

“The orchards will all be in bloom, and ought to look rather fine,”
said Stuart; “by the way, did I mention that I’m invited as well?
We can paint the place as red as we please; Dorothy and Ralph won’t
interfere with us much. Dorothy wanted to know if she need write to you
both separately, but I said it would be all right.”

“Dorothy--Ralph--Devonshire,” echoed Merle, when she was alone with
Peter; “what a picture it conveys of flowered chintz and cream and low
window-seats. I’m sure the tenants call her Mistress Dorothy, and she
has calm grey eyes, and wears a fichu, and keys.”

“Rather an inadequate costume,” Peter murmured; “and I can’t imagine
a sister of Stuart with ‘calm’ anything. Shall we accept? My country
boots are done for.”

“Buy new ones.”

“New ones always take weeks to tame. I’d rather tame a bull than boots.
The Bull and Boot sounds like a public-house. I wish Stuart hadn’t
taught me to search for the hidden pub. in my most innocent phrases.”

“It’s rather a low habit,” Merle agreed. “Yes, I think we’ll visit
Mistress Dorothy in Devon, if Grandmaman has no objections.”

Grandmaman had no objections whatever, though the invitation came
somewhat too informally for her notions of etiquette. She was also at a
loss how Merle was to make adequate return to her hostess, and insisted
on the girl packing the gift of a three-tiered satin bonbonnière among
her evening frocks, by way of a beginning in the balancing of ledgers.

Peter bought her boots; gladdened Miss Esther’s county soul by an
entirely fabulous narrative relating to the ancient birth and lineage
of Squire Ralph Orson of Orson Manor; and on the fifth of May, met
her two fellow-travellers at Paddington. Stuart established her with
Merle in a first-class carriage, with every possible luxury; for in
detail-work he excelled, never allowing their schemes to be upset by a
single hitch of the mechanical order. Then, to their astonishment, he
begged leave to retire to a smoker.

“Aren’t we looking our best?” Peter demanded of Merle, as the train
quitted the platform, and the belt of his Norfolk coat vanished down
the corridor. “Or is he trying to impress us with the fact that for
the future he intends to Lead a Man’s Life?”

They saw nothing of him during the next few hours, not even in the
luncheon-car. And towards three o’clock Peter declared they must be
within that distance of Dawlish, the station for Orson Manor, when
respectable people with rugs would begin strapping them:

“Not having any rugs, we’ll compromise by washing our faces.”

Merle leant out of the window, and took a deep breath of the sparkling
air.

“Stuart didn’t say it was near the sea,” as the train ran alongside the
broken silver line of wave. “Why, this _is_ Dawlish! Peter, here we
are--we----”

The engine gathered all its slumbering forces, and thundered at the
speed of a mile a minute through the tiny station in its setting of
bold red rock.

“It--hasn’t--stopped,” gasped Merle. Which was obvious, seeing that her
slight figure against the window was flung from side to side by the
reckless pace at which the express was pounding through Devon.

And: “Stuart, it hasn’t stopped!” as that gentleman, with a pleasant
smile, and still carrying his pipe, entered their compartment and sat
down.

“No; this is the ‘Cornishman.’ It goes right through from Plymouth to
Penzance.”

“But your sister?”

“My sister is in bed with influenza. And anyway, she’s not expecting
you. I doubt if she knows of your existence.”

He rose, and surveyed with a ferocious scowl his bewildered victims.

“I’ve abducted you!” quoth Stuart. “I’ve told you often enough that
I was a pirate in disguise. You wouldn’t believe me. You played with
fire. Now you’re abducted without the option of a fine. Open your
mouths and scream, if you like; I don’t mind.”

Peter eyed him sternly: “You mean that the invitation was a hoax? You
lured us from our homes on false pretences?”

He was humming a tune from the “Pirates of Penzance,” and at the same
time polishing his eye-glass. So he merely nodded assent.

Merle said quietly: “This will mean an awful row for me.”

“No, it won’t,” he reassured her; “because nobody need ever know. To
all intents and purposes we’re staying at Orson Manor. Dorothy only
comes to town about once every four years, and I’ll tip her the wink to
play up. She’ll do it for me,” finished the lord of the house of Heron.

“But where are we going?”

“Haven’t the remotest notion. We’ll see when we get to Penzance. And
I’ll let you both have a say in the matter, though it isn’t usual in
cases of abduction.”

He stole a glance at Peter; her eyes were dancing, and the corners of
her mouth tilted upwards. So that he knew he had pleased her. Though
she merely said: “So that’s why you refused to travel in our company,
is it?”

“I couldn’t stand your innocent chatter about Dorothy and Devon,” he
confessed; “it’s weak, I own, but even a pirate has a heart that bleeds
for prattling babes.”

“Yes, but look here: suppose Madame des Essarts and Mrs. Heron should
come together. Your mother will know that we are not where we seem.
They do meet, don’t they, Merle?”

Merle took fright at the notion. “Not often; they’re in different sets.
Grandmaman moves mainly among consuls, you know. But they visit on At
Home days. Oh, Stuart----”

“D’you take me for a bloomin’ amateur?” he demanded, “Haven’t I
provided for every contingency? I sat me down and thought and thought
and thought what one lady could be made to do, to mortally offend
another. I repeat, to mortally offend another. All for the prevention
of visits on At Home days. At last, I uprose, and put myrrh and
frankincense upon my hair, and went unto my mother; and, ‘Mother dear,’
I said, soft as any cooing dove; ‘I can see you are harassed and beset.
Would you like me to make out the list for your big reception next
month?’ Fortunately, I’ve played the good son once or twice before, so
my conduct couldn’t arouse the suspicions it deserved. Nay, she was
touched almost to the point of tears. So I sat me down again at her
desk, with lots of ceremonial and fuss--address-books heaped all round,
a new ruler, and red ink, and a Bradshaw and Debrett and the telephone
book; and made out a list of visitors, omitting the name of Madame des
Essarts. Mark you this, Merle! Then I read the list aloud to my mother,
including the name of Madame des Essarts. Mark you this also, Merle!
Then my mother, well-pleased, handed to her private secretary the list,
minus the name of Madame des Essarts. And Madame des Essarts, not
receiving an invitation to the reception, will be mortally offended.
And my mother, receiving no reply from Madame des Essarts, will
likewise be mortally offended. Both mortally offended. The feud will
probably extend over generations. Montague and Capulet. In consequence
whereof, Merle and I will be forbidden to marry. And I’ll die for the
love of a lady. ‘Lady, heyday, misery me----’”

“Stuart,” Peter broke in upon his exuberant ditty, “you’re just nothing
but a stage-manager. You’re not the sort of man for vagabondage.
And your grand operatic abduction will be a failure. Recollect, you
wouldn’t come with us a-Maying in April.”

“No,” he cried, stung to swift retort; “but who dares say that I have
not made of you April fools in May!”

The train swung over the Hamoaze and into Cornwall.

       *       *       *       *       *

They stopped at the Land’s End, for the reason that the sea barred
their further progress to the south and to the west. And they took
three rooms at the Ocean Hotel, facing the sea to the south and to
the west, because it was too late the night of their arrival to
seek convenient caves, especially three caves of exactly the same
dimensions, conditions essential to avoid jealousy and strife.

The Ocean Hotel stood on an isolation of headland, like some stone
medieval fortress, frowning at the rocky imitation opposite, which ran
far out into the Atlantic, and then piled itself up crag upon crag,
an echo wrought in granite. Over the moors towards the sunset ran the
coastguard’s path, white stones on the dark green, sheer up to an edge,
lost in the drop on the further side. And over the moors towards the
sunrise ran still the coastguard’s path, down an easy slope, looping a
sinister crevasse, and as far as the stretching horizon line.

Peter awoke the next morning, possessed by a great lust for actual
touch of the sea, where she had hitherto only enjoyed its sight and
sound; and would hardly leave her companions time to wallow in the
tubs of yellow cream which were a feature of their breakfast, in her
impatience to run down the steep twisting path which she knew existed
somewhere just outside....

But the land of Cornwall and the waves of Cornwall were not ready yet
to be friends with the strangers; and all that day led them a mocking
dance by crag and outjutting cape and promontory; over moor and round
seven points, and never a downward way to the sea. Cast an evil spell
upon the strangers, so that ever from two hundred feet below, the
water beckoned them stealthily into cavernous velvet glooms; sang
loudly of wonder and glory in the cold crash of breakers against the
cliff; tormented them with glint of blue in its plum-darkness, hint
of glittering green whenever the clouds above swirled aside to reveal
patches of clear sky. For the strangers need not yet be shown what riot
of colours were sheathed in scabbard of sullen grey. Peter could have
dragged the elusive sun by main force into prominence, battered with
fists of rage against the uncompromising fall of rock which baffled
her, and mocked her, and drew her on with continual promise of a way to
the sea round the next curve ... or perhaps the next ... or surely the
next....

Stuart laughed at her impatience. It was a hard land, a good land; and
he knew it, and did not talk about it, but was content to swing along
over turf and bog and stone; aware of limitless space in which to tire
his limbs. And once he came racing like a greyhound, past his comrades,
towards a six-barred gate which lay ahead. Ran because his stride was
swifter than any man’s. Leapt the gate because his jump was cleaner
than any man’s. Then, without a run on the further side, vaulted back,
and met the twain with a cry of “Mountebank!” in anticipation of how
they would greet his prowess.

But under his amused self-condemnation, lay the disturbing knowledge
that this desire to exhibit his utmost strength and skill was real, not
assumed; desire born of the look of pleasure that, after each feat,
would lurk in Peter’s eyes, though her lips continued to mock his
vanity. Stuart could have shaken her for this effect on him. He did not
mind at all behaving childishly, but objected vehemently to thinking
childishly.

Peter perched herself upon the gate; and airily told the sea that it
was all a mistake, she had no desire whatever to reach it. And the sea
in response threw out a sparkle of gold and a spurt of foam, so that
the longing rose in her heart fiercer than ever.

It was a gate padlocked and bolted, though it led to nowhere, and
guarded nothing; and to the right and left of it lay open country; and
to the immediate right and left, piled-up blocks of rough stone, for
kindly assistance of those who would elude the padlocks. A mad gate in
a mad country. And now the sun, thinking it had teased enough, broke
in a pale dazzle on the grey land and sea; then, gaining strength,
poured silver streams of light through a rent in the sky, lay in silver
puddles and splashes on the water. The dark toneless granite piled
itself into strange shapes of tower and turret, and all about the
sea-birds wheeled and shrieked.

    ... “Magic casements, opening on the foam
    Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn,”

murmured Stuart, prone beside Merle upon the turf. And she whispered
back:

“One could almost persuade oneself--yes, look, Stuart! a face at those
jagged rock-windows--light flying hair and haunted eyes and ... it’s
gone when you look again.”

“That’s Lyonnesse, yonder.” Peter, from her seat on the topmost bar,
indicated the wide shimmering tracts of grey and silver. “The sunken
lands, you know. Cities and churches and meadows ... but they must have
suffered some sea-change ... white bones and thick green water and the
evil coil of seaweed. A dead land, now.”

Stuart said musingly: “I see Lyonnesse more as the land where the dead
wait till they are wanted again.”

Peter smiled; so like Stuart, this glimpse of an afterwards as merely
the rest which comes before a fresh bout of strenuous labour. Then
couldn’t he even conceive of complete and utter rest? “Where the dead
wait till they are wanted again” ... she caught a fleeting glimpse of
dim caverns, and a tiny figure stumbling in from the outside glare, and
flinging down a torch, seized instantly by an upward-springing form,
who bore it forth again; while the tired intruder stretched himself in
sleep....

Heigh-ho! how serious they all were. Peter looked around her,
half-dazed by this long mental immersion in dark coral-caves. The sky
had meanwhile deepened into blue, and all the buried colours of earth
and water had leapt into being.

“Requires a dab of red in all that backcloth of green and black,
doesn’t it?” queried Peter idly; to break silence; “just for the sake
of artistic effect.”

“Whereabouts?”

“Oh, say against that ledge.” She pointed half-way down an apparently
inaccessible formation of cliff, jutting out at right angles to the
land.

Stuart seized the scarlet cap from her head, before she was even aware
of his intentions, and was almost directly over the edge of safety, and
out of sight.

“Stuntorian!” murmured Peter ... but her hand dug deep into the turf,
tore it up in great handfuls.

It was several minutes before they again caught sight of him,
scrambling with all the agility appertaining to impossible schoolboy
heroes, towards the spot indicated. His figure was reduced by distance
and surroundings to absurdly small dimensions. He paused on reaching
his goal, hung the patch of crimson on to the ledge of rock, waved
gaily towards his far-off companions; then, cramming the cap again in
his pocket, swung himself round a boulder apparently poised in mid-air,
and out of their line of vision.

“We’d better turn back to meet him,” quoth Merle, springing from her
perch on the gate. “It’s all right, Peter. Nothing can happen to
Stuart, ever.”

But Peter had just learnt of something extremely disturbing which had
happened to herself. And venting her indignation at the discovery,
upon the cause thereof, refused to fall sobbing upon his neck, when he
met them on the homeward way, and carelessly returned her headgear.
Nor did she take outward and visible notice of bleeding abrasions upon
either knee, ostentatiously displayed. But Merle--feeling his recent
performance ought really not to be encouraged--treated him to a sober
lecture on foolhardiness, which lasted till Peter provided distraction
by leaving her right leg, as far as the thigh, in a bog of black mud.

The sun was a level blaze of gold in their eyes, by the time they
trudged up the last slope, and into their fortress. They were weary
with a splendid weariness of limb; and drowsy with the strangeness
of that strange land; and, moreover, wind-blown and wet and satiated
of beauty. Peter entered her room, and closed the door; pulled down
the blind to give respite from the outside world; plunged her hands
in water, and cast off her shoes and stockings. Then flung herself on
the narrow bed, where Merle presently joined her. And they ate of the
expensive chocolates destined for Mistress Dorothy Orson, and were at
peace.

... Somebody whistling, now loudly, now softly, up and down the
passages and stairs. “Yo-ho! Yo-ho!”--it was Captain Hook’s celebrated
ditty haunting the Ocean Hotel. Nearing their door, it paused on a
plaintive up-note of enquiry. Peter took pity on the homeless wanderer,
and before Merle could protest, called him in.

“I don’t think I’ve got an apartment of my own,” said Stuart, squatting
contentedly on the floor, his head against Merle’s dark shower of
loosened hair. “I slept somewhere, I suppose, but where is a mystery.
They must have turned my room into a step-ladder or a revolving
book-case; I shall hate sleeping to-night in a revolving book-case; one
would get so giddy.” He glanced around him and broke into a chuckle:
“What a setting for one of Zola’s most squalid bits of realism,” he
remarked.

The room was small, with a dingy paper, and an unclothed gas-jet
springing from the wall. The blind that shut out daylight, and dimmed
the corners to mystery, was torn, and the cord flapped a perpetual
complaint. The tin basin on the washstand stood unemptied of its dirty
water. Two or three towels lay across the chairs; Peter’s muddy shoes
and stockings straggled in abandoned fashion over the worn bits of
carpet covering the oilcloth. The aspect of the two huddled bare-legged
figures on the crumpled bed-spread, carried out Stuart’s simile with
remarkable fidelity; and his own presence, combined with the dainty
satin bonbonnière, added just those last touches of immorality without
which no French novel is complete. Only their moods of serene happiness
were rather at variance with the puppets of fiction, evil or perhaps
merely hopeless, with which Zola might have peopled the dreary chamber.

“I think, as pirates, and considering Merle lives in Lancaster Gate and
owns a maid, we deserve a better nursery than this,” suggested Peter.

“We’ll build one,” Stuart assured her swiftly. “Yes, of course we will.
Nothing easier. We’ll build it to suit ourselves. A playroom----”

“A piratical playroom----”

“The perfect piratical playroom.”




CHAPTER IX

A PERFECT PIRATICAL PLAYROOM


Stuart began: “We shan’t care to be disturbed, so we’d better build
under water. That stretch of river between Cliveden and Cookham would
make quite a good ceiling. Nor will we take it on a repairing lease,
but leave the Thames Conservancy responsible for damages.”

Merle at this juncture wanted to know how he saw the Thames
Conservancy; in her eyes, it wore very bright blue with lots of gilt
buttons, and was always sitting round a table.

“One person?” asked Peter curiously.

“Yes. One wide person that could be stretched all round the table and
be joined with a button when it met itself.”

Stuart reminded them that, so far, the room consisted of a ceiling
floating on a vacuum, and that if they dawdled so long over Thames
Conservancies, they’d never get the walls up before dinner.

“It’s my dinner-hour now,” said Peter, thinking herself a British
workman. And Merle remarked that putting up walls was a tough job, and
she hadn’t got the right tools, and must fetch her mate.

“We can’t tell yet just how big the Room will need to be, so I vote for
elastic-sided walls.”

“Like boots,” Peter murmured. Then roused herself to ask for the height
of the Room.

Stuart looked worried, and confessed that he could never gauge heights
without the assistance of a giraffe: “Not high heights.”

“A giraffe?”

“I was once told that a giraffe measures twenty-five feet. So in my
mind’s eye I always pile giraffe upon giraffe, until I get what I want.
One giraffe, added to another ... and another....”

“There, there then, my beautiful,” Peter assured him soothingly, for
the multiplicity of giraffe had caused a wild look to creep into his
eyes; “you shall have a giraffe in the Room, of course you shall.
Anyhow, Merle will want a domestic animal to cuddle on her lap. A
giraffe will do nicely, besides being useful for measuring purposes.”

“We can tell the time by it, as well,” Stuart announced in eager
defence of his pet. “The tide of the ceiling rises and falls about an
inch every six hours; and when it falls, the animal’s head will be
wet, and so he’ll always have a cold in his nose, and borrow all our
handkerchiefs, and not return them. He says he can’t help it; people
don’t realize what a struggle it is to keep one’s head below water.”

“But he’ll want a companion of some sort,” remarked Merle. And because
she secretly hoped for a canary, she proposed a tortoise.

“What about a gift-horse? There’s something mysterious about a
gift-horse, because nobody may look it in the mouth. No, not even a
dentist.”

“But we will!” Stuart cried, in defiance of copy-book precept; “we’ll
keep things in its mouth, for the sake of looking at them there;
cigarette-cards and photograph albums.”

... A little wind flapped aside the blind, giving a momentary glimpse
of sea-lapped rocks and battlements: a castle of enchantment aglow in
the ebbing light. Merle immediately decided to have it transported
to the Room, for her special use and benefit. Not to be outdone,
Stuart and Peter ordered each a castle of like design and pattern; he
stipulating, however, for a border of Norfolk Broads in lieu of the
Atlantic. And because his manner was wont to become suddenly absent
and remote whenever he chanced to speak of his Sailing Paradise, they
quickly granted him his desire, and changed the subject, lest he should
elude them altogether.

Indeed, Peter was in a terrible tangle; for she had discovered that
inside her castle was a room--_the_ Room, in fact; and this Room in
its turn held a castle, the same castle--which held another Room,
containing a castle, which----

“Look here,” said Stuart firmly, recalling his mind from halyard and
jib, “this must be attended to at once. It’s only a recurring decimal,
and if we quickly put in the dot to stop the leakage, there’s no need
that it should ever recur.”

Peter demanded carelessly: “Know anything about plumbing?”

Stuart scratched his head. And the girls looked mournfully one at the
other.

“Now I ask you, what is the use of a male in the house?” and: “If it
were a _real_ man, of course----”

“Damn it!” he exploded. “If you’d wanted to marry a plumber, both of
you, you might have mentioned it before the ceremony.” And he added
sarcastically: “I daresay St. Quentin knows a lot about plumbing.”

“Or Baldwin,” suggested Merle, who had recently met Mr. Carr at a
dinner-party, and derived from him a quantity of pure happiness.

Stuart recovered his good-humour in the joy of a fresh idea: “We’ll run
St. Quentin and Baldwin together, and keep the essence in a sentry-box
in the Room, for the performing of odd jobs. And we’ll call him--” here
a rapid hunt for suitable nomenclature, “we’ll call him Squeith.”

“Combination of St. Quentin and Keith,” commented Peter. “Very good if
Baldwin’s name happened to be Keith, but as it isn’t----”

“I’m not going to be put off by a little thing like that. Squeith has
got personality. Squeith pleases me. And Squeith shall immediately be
set to work on that recurring decimal.”

It was perceived that even while they chattered, Room and castle had
already recurred seven times, ending on a Room. And Peter said she
would sleep in the last Room but one--the fifth, to be exact,--before
the dot was put in.

“And then Squeith can take the animals for a run,” quoth thoughtful
little Merle, who remembered that giraffes and gift-horses require a
certain amount of exercise. “He can put them on a leash if he likes.”

Stuart grumbled: “He’s sure to come home without them. Or they’ll
come home without him. Yes, it’s no good frowning at me, Merle,--I
_will_ bully Squeith. You’d better have your Balm-for-Wounded-Feelings
factory moved into the Room; ‘Nothing but the Best Balm supplied.
Beware of Counterfeit. We only use British Bull’s-grease and Home-grown
Sympathy.’ I’ll write your advertisements.”

Whereat Peter exclaimed jealously that if Merle had a factory, she
would have trains; she must have trains, instantly--“just as if I
could ever live in a Room without trains. An Outer Circle line running
the whole way round, close under the walls; with real tunnels and
signal-boxes. And you can advertise your Balm inside the darkest
tunnel, where it won’t disturb the landscape. My railway shall start
from Euston, of course----”

--“And end at Euston,” Merle reminded her, laughing, “if it’s a Circle
railway.”

“Quite right. The lines shall be laid for the purpose of taking
passengers from Euston to Euston. I’ve always longed for just such a
gloriously unpractical service of trains.”

And here Stuart interposed with the offer of his almost forgotten
_Wagon-lit_, the tame red _Wagon-lit_ with trustful brown eyes,
hitherto kept in the back garden among the washing.

“Want a present too,” Merle pleaded.

He gave her a clothes-line, so that she could be perpetually wringing
out her soul, and hanging it up to dry. In return for which piece
of impertinence, she presented him with a nice easy rack, which he
could work himself, like a barrel-organ, by turning a handle; and
thus practise for half an hour every morning after breakfast, the
self-torture he so affected.

“He shall have an obstacle race as well,” put in Peter lavishly;
“running just inside my Outer Circle radius. With hurdles and barriers
and sacks and barbed wire. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Stuart
darling?”

“We should have to provide a barber to barb the wire. One can’t buy it
barbed.”

“Very well; I don’t mind a few shops. Just a barber and--and a
post-office, because of bull’s-eyes----”

“Stamps?” enquired Stuart anxiously.

“No. _Only_ bull’s-eyes. Why do you think I wanted a post-office?”

Merle thought that a Moonshade Shop might be useful: “It looks as if
the moonshine in the Room were likely to be strong, and Peter and I
must think of our complexions. Moonshades and paralunes.” And she
imagined them pretty filmy things, woven of dyed spider-webs, with
opalescent handles and spikes.

Then they added to the row, a Railway Shop, which, combining butcher
and baker and fishmonger in one, provided those peculiar comestibles to
be met with at station-buffets and in dining-cars alone. In particular,
there existed the notorious Railway-fish, white and sticky, of which
large numbers should swim in a sunken tank in the Railway Shop, till
such time as required for consumption.

Then, as if one shop bred another, it was discovered that these wary
fish could not be caught save with a bent pin on a piece of string;
thus involving the erection of a Bent-pin Shop.

“Because in the usual farthing-change packets, they only give you
straight pins,” said Peter, knitting her brows; “and straight pins
aren’t a bit of good for Railway-fish.”

“What about a pub. or two?” Stuart proposed carelessly.

Merle scented danger: “No, dear.”

“Just one,” he pleaded; “a nice little public-house bearing the sign:
Private. There’s the ‘Cat and Adage,’ been lying about since the
evening we first met, Peter.”

“Oh, if it comes to that,” she bragged, “I’ve got plenty of pubs
myself: The ‘Benison,’ for instance, inspired by A. C. Benson’s life
of Tennyson. That would be non-alcoholic, of course; with a permanent
impression in the window, of birds dark against a peaceful sunset.”

Stuart approved of the ‘Benison.’ “I like its nice rich ripe
blessing-of-the-Archbishop-of-Canterbury flavour. And Squeith can
patronize it for his morning glass of milk-and-soda. I’ve thought of
another one----”

“_No_, Stuart!” Merle threw into her voice all the pent-up anguish of
an inebriate’s wife.

Stuart and Peter looked rebellious.

“I’m not going to have my nice tidy Room littered up with pubs.” Merle
declared passionately. “You must keep them in the conservatory or the
lumber-closet. I shall have quite enough dusting on my hands, as it is,
what with three castles----”

“One of them recurring,” put in Peter.

“Yes, and two Eustons and the giraffe and a Norfolk Broad and a
sentry-box and I don’t know what else. Whatever I shall do on
Thursdays----”

“Thursdays?”

“Thursdays?”

“The day the Room gets turned out,” Merle enlightened their double
ignorance.

“Oh!”

“It seems rather a shame that Merle should be bothered with all that,”
Stuart mused thoughtfully. “What about having a property Womanly-Woman
to see to the dusting?”

Peter assented rather reluctantly; she was quite sure that the
Womanly-woman would make her wear gloves. “Oh well! if she became at
all obstreperous, we could always break her up, and re-form her as
something else. An Ancient Retainer, say; or a Rabbit. These Plasticine
figures are awfully useful.”

“There’d be a bit of Womanly-Woman over from a Rabbit; enough to make a
tea-spoon, or a halo, or any domestic trifle of that description.”

“Then are we to have no real human people in the Room, except just
ourselves?” Merle queried. “No--children?”

Stuart shook his head. “No children. Only childishness.” For he
recognized, deep down in his heart, that real children would stigmatize
the Room and all it contained, as “silly rot.” And demand bricks and
Noah’s Arks and Tiddley-winks. And somehow the knowledge hurt; because
he knew with what fatal ease he too could slide outside and say the
same: “Silly rot--silly rot----” “It isn’t! Rot, if you like--not
_silly_ rot!”... but even now he was slipping.... “It isn’t! it
isn’t--Peter....”

Peter guessed what was happening: “No, of course it isn’t,” quickly.
And to divert him, contributed to the Room a sailing-boat, a rustic
sailing-boat, stationary, and overgrown with ivy and clematis. And
from the stern should depend a tiny toy sailing-boat, price sixpence
halfpenny, which they could really sail on a piece of string. “And
we’ll name it the ‘Strike-me-pink,’” cried Peter fiercely.

“And paint it green,” added Stuart, feeling better. And then, in
opposition, he offered a nautical summer-house, with decks, and ropes,
and a burgee fluttering bravely from the mainmast.

The Room might by now be considered almost complete in its furnishings.
With a Heaven-born inspiration, Merle placed in its exact centre a
small bamboo table, rather rickety, on which reposed a vase of flowers.

“Don’t you think,” Peter demanded doubtfully, “that it looks a wee bit
out of place among all those castles and animals and things?”

“Not at all;” Merle was inclined to be huffy. “Merely the feminine
touch about the home;” and she considered the possibility of draping
Euston with an antimacassar.

       *       *       *       *       *

... Bit by bit, as the red ball of the sun quenched its fires in the
chill Atlantic, so the dingy little number nine bedroom of the Ocean
Hotel, grew darker and darker still. At last nothing could be descried
save the grey outlines of the tin basin; a glimmer across the cracked
looking-glass; on and around the bed, three figures, dimly sprawling.

       *       *       *       *       *

But in their own Playroom, the trio disport themselves as lords and
emperors. Boundless space is theirs; time without limit; while facts
they prick and shrivel like toy-balloons.

Peter, astride of the engine which draws her _wagon-lit_, is whizzing
round and round the Outer Circle, all the signals in her favour, that
naught shall arrest her triumphant speed.

Merle, discovering that Stuart has, after all, succeeded in importing
his private public-house, enters through its swing-doors, nothing loth
to demand a strawberry-ice-cream soda. The while Stuart dangles his
legs from the notched parapet of his castle; and noting Squeith in the
act of hailing the bell-buoy who sells the morning muffins, impishly
frustrates all such traffic by a sudden alteration of the time to
half-past five p.m.

“Tea is on the table,” he chants, a super-leprechaun; “and Squeith has
missed the muffin-man again! Poor Squeith! for him _always_ the muffin
that is stale; for him it is always yesterday.”

“And for us?” cries Peter, making a trumpet of her hands, as she
travels past at sixty miles an hour. And just catches his shouted
reply, wind-borne: “For us it is always to-morrow!”

“But it can’t be to-morrow without a to-day, can it?” argues Merle,
returning refreshed from the ‘Benison.’

“Why, yes; it can be the-day-after-to-morrow from yesterday!”

       *       *       *       *       *

... The housemaid tapped, and entered with the hot water.

“Shall I light the gas, Miss?”

“Yes, please;” Peter’s voice seemed to come from very far away.

While the housemaid hunted for the matches, a figure rose nonchalantly
from the floor, and stole out into the passage. So that the flare of
light revealed merely two sleepy-eyed girls lying across the bed.




CHAPTER X

CARN TREWOOFA


Stuart solved the riddle which lay in the personality of Mine Host, by
declaring that whereas in summer he followed the fair and guileless
calling of hotel-keeper, in winter a bolder voice summoned him forth,
and he threw off his disguises, and donned ear-rings, and became a
Corsair. And indeed there was that about him of jolly rakish raffish
swagger, a roll in his gait, and a ruddiness of visage, and withal a
disposition to solemn winking of the left eye, and a tendency to be
found in odd moments dancing strange dances the length of his own hall,
which gave to such a suggestion a flavour of likelihood.

Moreover, the Corsair had surrounded himself by a bewildering bevy
of females, whom he called variously his wife, his cousin, his
housekeeper, his secretary, and his manageress; but who were obviously
delicious yieldings of his six-months’ piracy.

But the Ocean Hotel could produce no equally satisfactory solution to
the problem of Merle, Peter, and Stuart; and the various possibilities
in the way of marital, sentimental, immoral, or blood relationship,
that their companionship entailed. Perceiving this, Stuart found
gentle delight in preserving strict impartiality in the bestowal of
his outward affections. The Spanish waiter at the Billet-doux would
have known much in common with the Five Females of the Ocean Hotel. A
climax was reached, when, under their assembled eyes, Peter entered
the breakfast-room and handed a tobacco-pouch to her lord and master,
reminding him in bell-like tones that he had left it in her room.
Whereat a shudder passed from guest to guest, and a horrified voice
remarked with more virtue than grammar, “Guessed it was her--I mean,
one can always tell!”

Then enter Merle with a book and a box of matches and a green felt
slipper: “You must have left them in my room, Stuart ...” and Stuart
affected great embarrassment,--and they were all three very happy and
contented.

But when the visitors at the hotel complained of people who go from
table to table before meals; deliberately and in the sight of all,
pouring cream from smaller vessels into one gigantic bowl, thereafter
placed upon their own table; then the Five Females did so persistently
harass and beset the Corsair, that he became quite melancholy, and
would sit all day long in the porch, gazing seawards, without even
the heart to nudge Peter in the ribs as she passed him by; a delicate
attention she sorely missed. For he liked the trio, perhaps recognizing
in them the germs of piracy, and was loth to give them notice to quit.

“You know, I really believe we shall be slung out before to-morrow,”
laughed Stuart; “we’re not a bit popular.” They were at that moment
topping for the first time the westward slope of moor. Not yet had they
succeeded in finding their path to the sea. Peter had almost despaired
of feeling the cool water swell and ebb about her ankles.

And then, suddenly, they saw Carn Trewoofa.

Carn Trewoofa lay tucked in a little cove, the green arm of the cliff
flung protectingly around it, as who should say: “All right, dear;
the nasty grim granite-land shan’t touch you then!” And the toy
fishing-village believed this, and was at peace, drowsy and tumbled in
the warm sunshine.

A toy fishing-village. Patched roofs; thatched roofs; roofs both
patched and thatched; wild and abandoned young roofs, seemingly kept
only in their places by heavy chains or great slabs of stone. Sturdy,
ugly stone walls, defying the winds, that, despite protective arm,
dealt sometimes roughly with toy villages. Dwellings of all shapes
and sizes, impartial dwellings for lobster or fowl or human. Round
windlass-tower, painted a startling white, presumably with what
was left over from the coastguard stones. Wood and slate and tar.
Overturned boats and baskets. Nets hung to dry; smocks dangling to
dry; dogs and children spread to dry; and on a rough bench outside the
lifeboat shed, a row of old salts, bearded and tough and stringy, and
beyond the utmost limits of dryness, so that the sun could do to them
no more.

A toy village, no doubt! The kind that one has longed to play with,
ever since first meeting it in picture book. Nor did it beguile with
false whispers, as had done the rest of the false land of Cornwall.
For the coastguard’s path ran straight down the cliff-side to the
very doors of the first fowl-house; and the rocks and pools of the
Atlantic trespassed so far into the heart of the village, that it was
difficult to disentangle them. A way to the sea at last.... Merle and
Peter ran shouting down and on and out, the length of a baby stone lug
that curved into the water, thinking in its infant delusion, that it
broke the force of the waves. And there, at the very furthest end, they
turned and surveyed Carn Trewoofa, spread in a glimmer of gold before
them. And they remarked the multitude of boats strewn drunkenly on the
cobbled slope from the shore to the first cluster of huts; remarked the
fleet of boats that rocked and swung on the vivid green of the bay;
green that beyond the lug deepened and glowed to shadowed ultramarine.
And they received a hint that somewhere was an inn; and somewhere
else the twisted fragments of an ancient wreck; and all about were
seagulls, swooping and balancing and shrieking. And well-pleased with
this latest and most complete piece of nursery-ware designed for
their happiness, they turned their gaze outwards, there to be met
by a rust-red sail passing swift as a dream over the broken white
wave-crests; while a mile nearer to the horizon, a quaint clockwork
lighthouse reared itself from a group of rocks, and made believe to
guard the bay.

Then Merle rubbed her eyes, and turned to Peter, and asked if it were
really all to be had for the price of two-and-eleven-pence-halfpenny?
and might she please carry it home herself?

Stuart joined them on the lug. “They can’t yarn,” he said regretfully,
jerking his thumb towards the line of ancient salts. “I’ve tried them
and they can’t. In fact, I believe they’re tin.”

“Detachable?” queried Peter.

“No; on a row. I daresay it would be possible to break one off from the
end. But they’re too old and glazed to be taught much; we must start
with the new generation, and teach the young idea how to salt. Perhaps
if we sowed among them a few volumes of W. W. Jacobs--I say, come along
and explore.”

They entered Carn Trewoofa softly, as if fearful it should break or
melt or in some such magical fashion manifest its unreality. And,
picking her way between rope and anchor and occasionally a stray
doorstep where there was no door, Merle came to a correct conclusion
regarding the origin of this wonder-corner: It was smell made concrete.
Someone had waved a wand over a handful of the richly mingled
prevailing odour of seaweed and sea, tar and fish and clover, straw
and fowl, soil and stone and lobster-pot; muttered a few compelling
words--and the result was Carn Trewoofa.

The trio were just able to add to their medley of impressions, the mad
swirl of paths, seven to one hut, that none could tell its back nor
yet its front; and the yet madder swirl of chickens, seventy to one
hen, and seven orphans to boot. Every ten yards traversed showed them a
painted slab set in the wall, or in a door, or even on a roof; a slab
and a slit and the word: Letters. They speculated what would happen if
somebody failed to realize that this was a toy village, and posted real
epistles in these alluring receptacles. “They are intended for all the
letters one has never sent,” Stuart declared; “letters to my own feet,
or to my great-uncle in Heaven; to the Times, and to a skylark, and to
the Red King in Looking-glass Land.”

Likewise he discovered the national fisheress costume to be a
cricket-cap; and counted no less than eight of these articles in the
wearing. “Which proves that once, many years ago, a cricket team
rounded the point in a pleasure steamer. And the Corsair lured them
all to their destruction. But their caps were washed up on the shore,
and worn ever since by the Women of Carn Trewoofa.--Nine! I’ll stalk
the lot e’er yet I quit this spot.” He counted the tenth on the head
of a buxom matron standing outside the “Longships” inn, and doing most
effective things with two buckets and a pump.

She nodded pleasantly to the three, and asked them in raucous Cornish
whether they were strangers in the land.

“Very,” responded Peter gloomily.

The wearer of the tenth cricket cap volunteered the information that
she had rooms to let.

“At the inn!” gasped Merle.

“Nay; up-along yon villa. T’inn be nowt fur t’ young leddies.”

Smilingly she indicated a grey stone cottage standing high on its own
steps, a few paces up the hill; its blind patient eyes looking steadily
across the bay, past the toy fishing-fleet, to where sea and sky merged
in a blue quivering haze.

They followed their guide into the tiny sitting-room of the “villa.”
And there Peter cast herself with a sigh of voluptuous content upon
a slippery slithery horsehair sofa; and Merle threw open the lid of a
wheezy harmonium--and broke it; and Stuart remained transfixed before
two black ivory elephants, which stood upon the mantelpiece. And
they each and all declared their intention of remaining in their new
quarters, never again to return to the disapproving atmosphere of the
Ocean Hotel.

Mrs. Trenner beamed. They did not realize then that her rosy
good-humour concealed the will of a Napoleon. For Mrs. Trenner was the
autocrat of Carn Trewoofa; its leader and counsellor; by virtue of
her unfailing prosperity and the excellence of her cooking. She owned
the inn, and property besides; and she owned her husband and son and
husband’s brother’s wife and their offspring, even as she now owned
Merle and Peter and Stuart. The sons and husband

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