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Title: A call
        The tale of two passions

Author: Ford Madox Ford

Release date: August 31, 2023 [eBook #71529]

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: Chatto & Windus, 1910

Credits: Laura Natal Rodrigues (Images generously made available by The Internet Archive.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A CALL ***


                                A CALL




                          FORD MADOX HUEFFER





WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  THE FIFTH QUEEN
  PRIVY SEAL
  THE FIFTH QUEEN CROWNED
  THE SOUL OF LONDON
  THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
  THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
  THE HALF-MOON
  MR. APOLLO
  THE ENGLISH GIRL


                                A CALL

                       THE TALE OF TWO PASSIONS




                                  BY

                          FORD MADOX HUEFFER




                   “We have a flower in our garden,
                         We call it Marygold:
                   And if you will not when you may,
                     You shall not when you wold.”

                                _Folk-Songs from Somerset_




                                LONDON
                            CHATTO & WINDUS
                                 1910




CONTENTS
 PART I
 PART II
 PART III
 PART IV
 PART V
 EPISTOLARY EPILOGUE




PART I




A CALL


I


IT was once said of Mr. Robert Grimshaw: “That chap is like a
seal”--and the simile was a singularly just one. He was like a seal
who is thrusting his head and shoulders out of the water, and, with
large, dark eyes and sensitive nostrils, is on the watch. All that
could be known of him seemed to be known; all that could be known of
the rest of the world he moved in he seemed to know. He carried about
with him usually, in a crook of his arm, a polished, light brown
dachshund that had very large feet, and eyes as large, as brown, and
as luminous, as those of his master. Upon the occasion of Pauline
Lucas’s marriage to Dudley Leicester the dog was not upon his arm, but
he carried it into the drawing-rooms of the many ladies who welcomed
him to afternoon tea. Apparently it had no attractions save its clear
and beautiful colour, its excellent if very grotesque shape, and its
complete docility. He called upon a lady at tea-time, and, with the
same motion that let him down into his chair, he would set the dog
upon the floor between his legs. There it would remain, as motionless
and as erect as a fire-dog, until it was offered a piece of buttered
tea-cake, which it would accept, or until its master gave it a minute
and hardly audible permission to rove about. Then it would rove. The
grotesque, large-little feet paddled set wide upon the carpet, the long
ears flapped to the ground. But, above all, the pointed and sensitive
nose would investigate with a minute attention, but with an infinite
gentleness, every object within its reach in the room, from the line of
the skirting-board to the legs of the piano and the flounced skirts of
the ladies sitting near the tea-tables. Robert Grimshaw would observe
these investigations with an indulgent approval; and, indeed, someone
else once said--and perhaps with more justness--that Mr. Grimshaw
resembled most nearly his own dog Peter.

But upon the occasion of Pauline Lucas’s marriage to Dudley Leicester,
in the rustle of laces, the brushing sound of feet upon the cocoa-nut
matting, to the strains of the organ, and the “honk” of automobiles
that, arriving, set down perpetually new arrivals, the dog Peter
pursued no investigations. Neither, indeed, did Mr. Grimshaw, for he
was upon ground absolutely familiar. He was heard to be asked and to
answer: “Where _did_ Cora Strangeways get her dresses made?” with
the words: “Oh, she gets them at Madame Serafine’s, in Sloane Street. I
waited outside once in her brougham for nearly two hours.”

And to ladies who asked for information as to the bride’s antecedents,
he would answer patiently and gently (it was at the very beginning of
the winter season, and there were present a great many people “back
from” all sorts of places--from the Rhine to Caracas)----

“Oh, Pauline’s folk are the very best sort of people in the world.
Her mother was army, her father navy--well, you all know the Lucases
of Laughton, or you ought to. Yes, it’s quite true what you’ve heard,
Mrs. Tressillian; Pauline was a nursery governess. What do you
make of it? Her father _would_ go a mucker in South American
water-works because he’d passed a great deal of his life on South
American stations and thought he knew the country. So he joined the
other Holy Innocents--the ones with wings--and Pauline had to go as a
nursery governess till her mother’s people compounded with her father’s
creditors.”

And to Hartley Jenx’s croaking remark that Dudley Leicester might have
done himself better, Grimshaw, with his eyes upon the bride, raised and
hardened his voice to say:

“Nobody in the world could have done better, my good man. If it hadn’t
been Dudley, it would have been me. You’re come to the wrong shop. I
know what I’m talking about. I haven’t been carting Yankees around
ruins; I’ve been in the centre of things.”

Hartley Jenx, who estimated Dudley Leicester at five thousand a year
and several directorates, estimated Grimshaw at a little over ten, plus
what he must have saved in the six years since he had come into the
Spartalide money. For it was obvious that Grimshaw, who lived in rooms
off Cadogan Square and had only the smallest of bachelor shoots--that
Grimshaw couldn’t spend anything like his income. And amongst the
guests at the subsequent reception, Hartley Jenx--who made a living
by showing Americans round the country in summer, and by managing a
charitable steam-laundry in the winter--with croaking voice, might at
intervals be heard exclaiming:

“My _dear_ Mrs. Van Notten, my dear Miss Schuylkill, we don’t
estimate a girl’s fortune here by what she’s got, but by what she’s
refused.” And to the accentuated “My’s!” of the two ladies from
Poughkeepsie he added, with a singular gravity:

“The bride of the day has refused sixty thousand dollars a year!”


So that, although the illustrated papers lavishly reproduced Pauline’s
pink-and-white beauty, stated that her father was the late Commodore
Lucas, and her mother a daughter of Quarternion Castlemaine, and
omitted the fact that she had refused twelve thousand a year to many
seven and a few directorates, there were very few of those whom
Grimshaw desired to have the knowledge that did not know this his
tragedy.

On the steps of the church, Robert Grimshaw was greeted by his cousin,
Ellida Langham, whose heavily patterned black veil, drooping hat
of black fur, and long coat all black with the wide black sleeves,
enhanced the darkness of her coal-black eyes, the cherry colour of
her cheeks, and the rich red of her large lips. Holding out her
black-gloved hand with an odd little gesture, as if at the same time
she were withdrawing it, she uttered the words:

“Have you heard anything of Katya?” Her head seemed to be drawn back,
birdlike, into the thick furs on her neck, and her voice had in it
a plaintive quality. Being one of two daughters of the late Peter
Lascarides, and the wife of Paul Langham, she was accounted fortunate
as owning great possessions, a very attached husband, and sound
health. The plaintive tone in her voice was set down to the fact that
her little daughter of six was said to be mentally afflicted, and
her sister Katya to have behaved in the strangest possible manner.
Indeed, Mr. Hartley Jenx was accustomed to assure his American friends
that Katya Lascarides had been sent abroad under restraint, though
her friends gave it out that she was in Philadelphia working at a
nerve-cure place.

“She is still in Philadelphia,” Robert Grimshaw answered, “but I
haven’t heard from her.”

Ellida Langham shivered a little in her furs.

“These November weddings always make me think of Katya and you,” she
said; “it was to have been done for you in November, too. I don’t think
you have forgotten.”

“I’m going to walk in the Park for ten minutes,” Grimshaw replied.
“Peter’s in the shop. Come too.”

She hooked herself on to his arm to be conducted to her coupé at the
end of a strip of red carpet, and in less than two minutes they were
dropped on the pavement beside the little cigar-shop that is set, as
it were, into the railings of the Park. Here Peter the dachshund,
sitting patiently on the spot where his master had left him, beside the
doormat, greeted Robert Grimshaw with one tiny whimper and a bow of
joy; and then, his nose a hair’s-breadth from Robert Grimshaw’s heel,
he paddled after them into the Park.

It was very grey, leafless, and deserted. The long rows of chairs
stretched out untenanted, and the long perspective of the soft-going
Ladies’ Mile had no single rider. They walked very slowly, and spoke in
low tones.

“I almost wish,” Ellida Langham said, “that you had taken Katya’s
offer. What could have been said worse of her than they say now?”

“What do you say of her as it is?” Robert Grimshaw answered.

Mrs. Langham drooped in discouragement.

“That she is engaged in good works. But in Philadelphia! Who believes
in good works in Philadelphia? Besides, she’s acting as a nurse--for
payment. That isn’t good works, and it’s disagreeable to lie even about
one’s sister.”

“Whatever Katya did,” Robert Grimshaw answered seriously, “she would
be engaged in good works. You might pay her a king’s salary, and she’d
still do more than she was paid for. That’s what it is to do good
works.”

“But if you had taken her on her own terms ...”--Mrs. Langham seemed as
if she were pleading with hint--“don’t you think that one day she or
you will give in?”

“I think she never will, and she may be right,” he answered. “I think I
never shall, and I know I am.”

“But if no one ever knew,” she said “wouldn’t it be the same thing as
the other thing?”

“Ellida, dear,” he answered gravely, “wouldn’t _that_ mean a great
deal more lying for you--about your sister?”

“But wouldn’t it be much better worth lying about?” she appealed to
him. “You are such a dear, she’s such a dear, and I could cry; I want
you to come together so much!”

“I don’t think I shall ever give in,” he answered. And then, seeing a
real moisture of tears in the eyes that were turned towards him, he
said:

“I might, but not till I grow much more tired--oh, _much_ more
tired!--than I am.”

And then he added, as briskly as he could, for he spoke habitually in
low tones, “I am coming in to supper to-night, tell Paul. How’s Kitty?”

They were turning across the soft going, down towards where Mrs.
Langham’s motor was waiting for her beside the door of the French
Embassy.

“Oh, Doctor Tressider says there’s nothing to be fundamentally anxious
about. He says that there are many children of six who are healthy
enough and can’t speak. I don’t exactly know how to put it, but he
says--well, you might call it a form of obstinacy.”

Robert Grimshaw said “Ah!”

“Oh, I know you think,” his cousin commented, “that that runs in the
family. At any rate, there’s Kitty as lively as a lark and perfectly
sound physically, and she won’t speak.”

“And there’s Katya,” Mr. Grimshaw said, “as lively as a thoroughbred,
and as sound as a roach, and a great deal better than any angel--and
she won’t marry.”

Again Mrs. Langham was silent for a moment or two, then she added:

“There was mother, too. I suppose that was a form of obstinacy. You
remember she always _used_ to say that she would imitate poor
mother to the death. Why--mother used to dress ten years before her age
so that Katya should not look like a lady of fifty. What a couple of
angels they were, weren’t they?”

“You haven’t heard”--Mr. Grimshaw continued his musings--“you haven’t
heard from your mother’s people that there was any obstacle?”

“None in the world,” she answered. “There couldn’t have been. We’ve
made all the inquiries that were possible. Why, my father’s private
bank-books for years and years back exist to this day, and there’s no
payment in them that can’t be traced. There would have been mysterious
cheques if there were anything of the sort, but there’s nothing,
nothing. And mother--well, you know the Greek system of dealing with
girls--she was shut up in a harem till she--till she came out here to
father. No, it’s inexplicable.”

“Well, if Kitty’s obstinate _not_ to imitate people,” Grimshaw
commented, “you can only say that Katya’s obstinacy takes the form of
imitation.”

Mrs. Langham gave vent to a little sort of wail.

“You aren’t going back on Katya?” she said. “It isn’t true, is it, that
there’s another?”

“I don’t know whether it’s true or not true,” Grimshaw said, “but you
can take it that to-day’s ceremony has hit me a little hard. Katya is
always first, but think of that dear little woman tied to the sort of
obtuse hypochondriac that Dudley Leicester is!”

“Oh, but there’s nothing in Pauline Lucas,” Mrs. Langham objected, “and
I shouldn’t say Dudley was a hypochondriac. He looks the picture of
health.”

“Ah, you don’t know Dudley Leicester as I do,” Grimshaw said. “I’ve
been his best friend for years.”

“I know you’ve been very good to him,” Ellida Langham answered.

“I know I have,” Grimshaw replied, as nearly as possible grimly. “And
haven’t I now given him what was dearest and best to me?”

“But Katya?” Mrs. Langham said.

“One wants Katya,” Grimshaw said--“one wants Katya. She is vigour, she
is life, she is action, she is companionship. One wants her, if you
like, because she is chivalry itself, and so she’s obstinate; but, if
one can’t have Katya, one wants....”

He paused and looked at the dachshund that, when he paused, paused and
looked back at him.

“That’s what one wants,” he continued. “One wants tenderness, fidelity,
pretty grace, quaintness, and, above all, worship. Katya could give me
companionship; but wouldn’t Pauline have given me worship?”

“But still ...” Mrs. Langham commenced.

“Oh, I know,” Grimshaw interrupted, “there’s nothing _in_ her, but
still....”

“But still,” Mrs. Langham mocked him, “dear old Toto, you _do_
want to talk about her. Let’s take another little turn; I can give you
five minutes more.”

She beckoned to her car to come in at the gates and follow them along
the side-walk past the tall barracks in the direction of Kensington.

“Yes, I dearly want to talk about Pauline,” Grimshaw said, and his
cousin laughed out the words:

“Oh, you strong, silent men! Don’t you know you are called a strong,
silent man? I remember how you used to talk to Katya and me about all
the others before you got engaged to Katya. When I come to think of
it, the others were all little doll-things like Pauline Leicester.
Katya used to say: ‘There’s nothing _in_ them!’ She used to say
it in private to me. It tore her heart to shreds, you know. I couldn’t
understand how you came to turn from them to her, but I know you did
and I know you do....”

“You haven’t changed a bit, Toto,” she began again. “You play at being
serious and reserved and mysterious and full of knowledge, but you’re
still the kiddie in knickerbockers who used to have his pockets full
of chocolate creams for the gardener’s mite of a daughter. I remember
I used to see you watching her skip. You’d stand for minutes at a time
and just devour her with your eyes--a little tot of a thing. And then
you’d throw her the chocolate creams out of the window. You were twelve
and I was nine and Katya was seven and the gardener’s daughter was six,
but what an odd boy I used to think you!”

“That’s precisely it,” Grimshaw said. “That’s what I want in Pauline. I
don’t want to touch her. I want to watch her going through the lancers
with that little mouth just open, and the little hand just holding out
her skirt, and a little, tender expression of joy. Don’t you see--just
to watch her? She’s a small, light bird. I want to have her in a cage,
to chirrup over her, to whistle to her, to give her grapes, and to have
her peep up at me and worship me. No, I haven’t changed. When I was
that boy it didn’t occur to me that I could have Katya; we were like
brother and sister, so I wanted to watch little Millie Neil. Now I know
I might have Katya and I can’t, so I want to watch Pauline Leicester. I
want to; I want to; I want to.”

His tones were perfectly level and tranquil; he used no gesture; his
eyes remained upon the sand of the rolled side-walk, but his absolutely
monotonous voice expressed a longing so deep, and so deep a hunger that
Ellida Langham said:

“Oh, come, cheer up, old Toto; you’ll be able to watch her as much as
you want. I suppose you will dine with the Leicesters the three times a
week that you don’t dine with us, and have tea with Pauline every day,
won’t you?”

“But they’re going out of England for a month,” Grimshaw said, “and I’m
due to start for Athens the day before they come back.”

“Oh, poor boy!” Ellida commiserated him. “You won’t be able to watch
your bird in Leicester’s cage for a whole ten weeks. I believe you’d
like to cry over her.”

“I should like to cry over her,” Robert Grimshaw said, with perfect
gravity. “I should like to kneel down and put my face in her lap and
cry, and cry, and cry.”

“As you used to do with me years ago,” she said.

“As I used to do with you,” he answered.

“Poor--old--Tot,” she said very slowly, and he kissed her on her veil
over her cheek, whilst he handed her into her coupé. She waved her
black-gloved fingers at him out of the passing window, and, his hands
behind his back, his shoulders square and his face serious, tranquil,
and expressing no emotion, he slowly continued his stroll towards the
Albert Memorial. He paused, indeed, to watch four sparrows hopping
delicately on their mysterious errands, their heads erect, through
the grimy and long grass between the Park railings and the path. It
appeared to him that they were going ironically through a set of
lancers, and the smallest of them, a paler coloured hen, might have
been Pauline Leicester.




II


THAT was not, however, to be the final colloquy between Robert Grimshaw
and Ellida Langham, for he was again upon her doorstep just before her
time to pour out tea.

“What is the matter?” she asked; “you know you _aren’t_ looking
well, Toto.”

Robert Grimshaw was a man of thirty-five, who, by reason that he
allowed himself the single eccentricity of a very black, short beard,
might have passed for fifty. His black hair grew so far back upon
his brow that he had an air of incipient baldness; his nose was
very aquiline and very sharply modelled at the tip, and when, at
a Christmas party, to amuse his little niece, he had put on a red
stocking-cap, many of the children had been frightened of him, so
much did he resemble a Levantine pirate. His manners, however, were
singularly unnoticeable; he spoke in habitually low tones; no one
exactly knew the extent of his resources, but he was reputed rather
“close,” because he severely limited his expenditure. He commanded a
cook, a parlourmaid, a knife-boy, and a man called Jervis, who was the
husband of his cook, and he kept them upon board wages. His habits
were of an extreme regularity, and he had never been known to raise
his voice. He was rather an adept with the fencing-sword, and save
for his engagement to Katya Lascarides and its rupture he had had no
appreciable history. And, indeed, Katya Lascarides was by now so nearly
forgotten in Mayfair that he was beginning to pass for a confirmed
bachelor. His conduct with regard to Pauline Lucas, whom everybody had
expected him to marry, was taken by most of his friends to indicate
that he had achieved that habit of mind that causes a man to shrink
from the disturbance that a woman would cause to his course of life.
Himself the son of an English banker and of a lady called Lascarides,
he had lost both his parents before he was three years old, and he
had been brought up by his uncle and aunt, the Peter Lascarides, and
in the daily society of his cousins, Katya and Ellida. Comparatively
late--perhaps because as Ellida said, he had always regarded his
cousins as his sisters--he had become engaged to his cousin Katya,
very much to the satisfaction of his uncle and his aunt. But Mrs.
Lascarides having died shortly before the marriage was to have taken
place, it was put off, and the death of Mr. Lascarides, occurring four
months later, and with extreme suddenness, the match was broken off,
for no reason that anyone knew altogether. Mr. Lascarides had, it was
known, died intestate, and apparently, according to Greek law, Robert
Grimshaw had become his uncle’s sole heir. But he was understood to
have acted exceedingly handsomely by his cousins. Indeed, it was a fact
Mr. Hartley Jenx had definitely ascertained, that upon the marriage of
Ellida to Paul Langham, Robert Grimshaw had executed in her benefit
settlements of a sum that must have amounted to very nearly half his
uncle’s great fortune. Her sister Katya, who had been attached to
her mother with a devotion that her English friends considered to be
positively hysterical, had, it was pretty clearly understood, become
exceedingly strange in her manner after her mother’s death. The reason
for her rupture with Robert Grimshaw was not very clearly understood,
but it was generally thought to be due to religious differences. Mrs.
Lascarides had been exceedingly attached to the Greek Orthodox Church,
whereas, upon going to Winchester, Robert Grimshaw, for the sake of
convenience and with the consent of his uncle, had been received
into the Church of England. But whatever the causes of the rupture,
there was no doubt that it was an occasion of great bitterness. Katya
Lascarides certainly suffered from a species of nervous breakdown, and
passed some months in a hydropathic establishment on the Continent;
and it was afterwards known by those who took the trouble to be at
all accurate in their gossip that she had passed over to Philadelphia
in order to study the more obscure forms of nervous diseases. In this
study she was understood to have gained a very great proficiency,
for Mrs. Clement P. Van Husum, junior, whose balloon-parties were
such a feature of at least one London season, and who herself had
been one of Miss Lascarides’ patients, was accustomed to say with
all the enthusiastic emphasis of her country and race--she had been
before marriage a Miss Carteighe of Hoboken, N.Y.--that not only had
Katya Lascarides saved her life and reason, but that the chief of the
Philadelphian Institute was accustomed always to send Katya to diagnose
obscure cases in the more remote parts of the American continent. It
was, as the few friends that Katya had remaining in London said, a
little out of the picture--at any rate, of the picture of the slim,
dark and passionate girl with the extreme, pale beauty and the dark
eyes that they remembered her to have had.

But there was no knowing what religion might not have done for this
southern nature if, indeed, religion was the motive of the rupture
with Robert Grimshaw; and she was known to have refused to receive
from her cousin any of her father’s money, so that that, too, had some
of the aspect of her having become a nun, or, at any rate, of her
having adopted a cloisteral frame of mind, devoting herself, as her
sister Ellida said, “to good works.” But whatever the cause of the
quarrel, there had been no doubt that Robert Grimshaw had felt the
blow very severely--as severely as it was possible for such things to
be felt in the restrained atmosphere of the more southerly and western
portions of London. He had disappeared, indeed, for a time, though
it was understood that he had been spending several months in Athens
arranging his uncle’s affairs and attending to those of the firm of
Peter Lascarides and Company, of which firm he had become a director.
And even when he returned to London it was to be observed that he was
still very “hipped.” What was at all times most noticeable about him,
to those who observed these things, was the pallor of his complexion.
When he was in health, this extreme and delicate whiteness had a
subcutaneous flush like the intangible colouring of a China rose. But
upon his return from Athens it had, and it retained for some time, the
peculiar and chalky opacity. Shortly after his return he engrossed
himself in the affairs of his friend Dudley Leicester, who had lately
come into very large but very involved estates. Dudley Leicester, who,
whatever he had, had no head for business, had been Robert Grimshaw’s
fag at school, and had been his almost daily companion at Oxford and
ever since. But little by little the normal flush had returned to
Robert Grimshaw’s face; only whilst lounging through life he appeared
to become more occupied in his mind, more reserved, more benevolent and
more gentle.


It was on observing a return of the excessive and chalk-like opacity
in Robert Grimshaw’s cheeks that Ellida, when that afternoon he called
upon her, exclaimed:

“What’s the matter? You know you aren’t looking well. One would think
Peter was dead.”

“You’ve got,” he said, “to put on your things and come and see them off
at the station.”

“I?” she protested. “What are they to me?”

He passed his hand over his forehead.

“I’ve got to go,” he said. “I don’t want to, but I’ve got to. I’ve got
to see the last of Pauline.”

Ellida said: “_Oh_!”

“It’s not,” he answered, “a question of what you are to them, but of
what I am to you. You’re the only sister I’ve got in the world.”

Ellida was walking up to him to put her hands upon his shoulders.

“Yes, dear,” she was beginning, with the note of tenderness in her
voice.

“And,” he interrupted her, “you’re the only sister that Katya’s got in
the world. If I’ve arranged this marriage it’s for your sake, to keep
myself for Katya.”

She gave a little indrawing of the breath:

“Oh, Toto dear,” she said painfully, “is it as bad as that?”

“It’s as bad as that--it’s worse,” he answered.

“Then don’t go,” she pleaded. “Stop away. What’s the use of it?”

“I can’t,” he said numbly. “It’s no use, but I can’t stop away;” and
he added in a fierce whisper: “Get your things on quickly; there’s not
much time. I can’t answer for what will happen if you’re not there to
safeguard Katya’s interests.”

She shivered a little back from him.

“Oh, Toto,” she said, “it’s not that I’m thinking of. It’s you, if
you’re in such pain.”

“Be quick! be quick!” he insisted.

Whilst she was putting on her furs she sent in to the room the small,
dark, laughing and dumb Kitty. With steps of swift delight, with an air
at once jolly and elfin, the small, dark child in her white dress ran
to catch hold of the lappets of her uncle’s coat, but for the first
time in his life Robert Grimshaw gazed out unseeing over his niece’s
head. He brushed her to one side and began to walk feverishly down the
room, his white teeth gleaming with an air of fierceness through the
bluish-black of his beard and moustache. But even with their haste, it
was only by almost running along the platform beside the train that
Ellida was able in the dusk to shake the hands of Dudley Leicester and
his wife. Grimshaw himself stood behind her, his own hands behind his
back. And Ellida had a vision, as slowly the train moved, of a little,
death-white, childish face, of a pair of blue eyes, that gazed as if
from the face of Death himself, over her shoulder. And then, whilst
she fumbled with the flowers in her breast, Pauline Leicester suddenly
sank down, her head falling back amongst the cushions, and at the last
motion of her hand she dropped on to the platform the small bunch of
violets. Ellida leaned forward with a quick and instinctive gesture of
rescue.

“She’s fainted!” she exclaimed. “Oh, _poor_ child!”

The train glided slowly and remorselessly from the platform, and for a
long time Robert Grimshaw watched it dwindling out of the shadow of the
high station into the shadows of the falling November dusk, until they
were all alone on the platform. And suddenly Robert Grimshaw ground
the little bunch of flowers beneath his heel vindictively, his teeth
showing as they bit his lower lip.

“_Toto_!” Ellida exclaimed in a tone of sharp terror and anguish,
“why did she throw them to you? She shouldn’t have. But why do you do
that?”

His voice came harshly from his throat.

“They were my flowers--my gift. She was throwing them away. Hadn’t you
the sense to see that?” and his voice was cruel.

She recoiled minutely, but at his next action she came swiftly forward,
her hands outstretched as if to stop him. He had picked up the violets,
his lips moving silently. He touched with them each of his wrists, each
of his eyes, his lips and his heart.

“Oh, don’t,” she said. “You aren’t serious--you can’t be serious!” for,
as it seemed to her, semi-ironically her cousin was going through a
Greek incantation that they had been told of by their old Greek nurse.
“You can’t _want_ to retain that poor little thing’s affections.”

“Serious!” Robert Grimshaw muttered.

“Oh, Robert,” she said, “what have you done it for? If she’s so
frightfully in love with you, and you’re so frightfully in love with
her ... and you’ve only got to look at her face to see. I never saw
such misery. Isn’t it horrible to think of them steaming away together?”

Robert Grimshaw clenched his teeth firmly. “What did I do it for?” he
said.

His eyes wandered over the form of a lady who passed them in earnest
conversation with a porter. “That woman’s going to drop her purse out
of her muff,” he said; and then he added sharply: “I didn’t know what
it would mean; no, I didn’t know what it would mean. It’s the sort of
thing that’s done every day, but it’s horrible.”

“It’s horrible,” Ellida repeated. “You oughtn’t to have done it. It’s
true I stand for Katya, but if you wanted that child so much and she
wanted you so dreadfully, wasn’t it your business to have made her
happy, and yourself? If I’d known, _I_ shouldn’t have stood in the
way, not even for Katya’s sake. She’s no claim--none that can be set
against a feeling like that. She’s gone away; she’s shown no sign.”

She stopped, and then she uttered suddenly:

“Oh, Robert, you oughtn’t to have done it; no good can come of it.”

He turned upon her sharply.

“Upon my word,” he said, “you talk like an old-fashioned shopkeeper’s
wife. Nothing but harm can come of it! What have we arrived at in our
day and our class if we haven’t learnt to do what we want, to do what
seems proper and expedient--and to take what we get for it?”

They turned and went slowly up the long platform.

“Oh, our day and our class,” Ellida said slowly. “It would be better
for Pauline to be the old-fashioned wife of a small shopkeeper than
what she is--if she cared for him.”

They were nearly at the barrier, and he said:

“Oh sentimentality, sentimentality! I had to do what seemed best for,
us all--that was what I wanted. Now I’m taking what I get for it.”

And he relapsed into a silence that lasted until they were nearly at
home. And seated beside him in her coupé, Ellida, with the little deep
wisdom of the woman of the household, sat beside him in a mood of
wonder, of tenderness, and of commiseration.

“And it’s always like this,” she seemed to feel in her wise, small
bones. “There they are, these men of ours. We see them altogether
affable, smiling, gentle, composed. And we women have to make believe
to their faces and to each other that they’re towers of strength and
all-wise, as they like to make out that they are. We see them taking
action that they think is strong; and forcible, and masculine, and that
we know is utterly mad; and we have to pretend to them and to each
other that we agree in placid confidence; and then we go home, each
one of us with our husbands or our brothers, and the strong masculine
creature breaks down, groans and drags us after him hither and thither
in his crisis, when he has to pay for his folly. And that’s life. And
that’s love. And that’s the woman’s part. And that’s all there is to
it.”

It is not to be imagined that Ellida did anything so unsubtle as to put
these feelings of hers, even to herself, into words. They found vent
only in the way her eyes, compassionate and maternal, rested on his
brooding face. Indeed, the only words she uttered, either to herself
or to him, were, with deep concern--he had taken off his hat to ease
the pressure of the blood in his brows--as she ran her fingers gently
through his hair:

“Poor old Toto!”

He remained lost in his abstraction, until they were almost at her
door. Then he squared his shoulders and resumed his hat.

“Yet I’m sure I was right,” he said. “Just consider what it was up to
me to do. You’ve got to think that I don’t by any means care for Katya
less. I want her for myself. But I want to see to it that Pauline has a
good time, and I want to see her having it.”

“How can she have it if you’ve given her Dudley Leicester when she
wants you?”

“My dear child,” he answered, and he had become again calm, strong,
and infinitely lofty. “Don’t you understand that’s how Society has
to go on? It’s the sort of thing that’s got to happen to make us the
civilized people that we are. Dudley’s the best fellow in the world:
I’m sure he’s the best fellow in the world. I know everything he’s ever
done and every thought he’s ever thought for the last twenty years,
and everything that Pauline wants to do in this world he’ll do. She’ll
make a man of him. She’ll give him a career. He’ll be her life’s work.
And if you can’t have what you want, the next best thing is to have a
life’s work that’s worth doing, that’s engrossing, that keeps you from
thinking about what you haven’t got.”

Ellida refrained from saying that what a different thing it was, and
with his air of tranquil wisdom he went on:

“We’re all--all of us, in our class and our day, doing the same thing.
Every one of us really wants the moon, and we’ve got somehow to get
on with just the earth, and behave ourselves. I suppose what I really
want is both Katya and Pauline. That sort of thing is probably in our
blood--yours and mine--and no doubt in the great days of our race
I should have had both of them, but I’ve got to sacrifice physical
possession of one of them to the amenities of a civilization that’s
pleasant enough, and that’s taken thousands of years to bring together.
We’re the children of the age and of all the ages, and if at times it’s
painful, we’ve got to get over the pain somehow. This is done with. You
won’t see me wince again, not ever. It’s my business in life just to
wait for Katya, and to see that Pauline has a good time.”

Ellida did not say: “You mean, in fact, to keep as much as you want of
both of them?” She said instead: “What’s wanted is that Katya should
come back from Philadelphia to look after you. You need to be looked
after by a woman, and I’m going to get her.”

“Oh yes, I need to be looked after,” he said. And he added:

“But you know, dear, you do it splendidly.”

She nodded in the very least.

“Yes,” she said, “but you need to be looked after by at least two of
us, and to have the whole time of at least one. I’ve got Paul and I’ve
got Kitty as well as you.” She added to herself: “Katya will be able
to manage you with my hints. I don’t believe she could without, if
she is anything like the passionate darling she used to be.” And she
concluded out loud: “It’s Kitty that’s going to bring her back from
Philadelphia. I’ve had my trump card up my sleeve for some time, but I
haven’t wanted to interfere in matters with two such volcanoes as you
and she really are. It seemed too much of a responsibility. And I’ve
sort of felt that a little person like Pauline was the person who ought
to have _married_ you. I know it now. You ought to have married
Pauline and given her a good time. Then you could have gone on waiting
for Katya till the end of the chapter.”

Robert Grimshaw said “Oh!”

“But you’re in,” she shut him up, “such a hopeless pickle as it is
that I don’t believe even Katya, darling as she is, could make you any
worse. So that if she comes back you’d better just take her on her own
terms, and make the very best of it.”




III


PAULINE LEICESTER’S mother’s cottage had only one spare bedroom. It
stood in the New Forest, some seven miles from Brockenhurst, with no
house nearer it than just that seven miles. And Mrs. Lucas, the mother
of Pauline Leicester, suffered from angina pectoris. She was a little,
pleasant woman, with the greatest tact that was ever known; she played
a variety of Patiences, and she had one very attached servant. But,
little and pleasant and patient and tactful, she suffered very much
pain.

It was not, indeed, angina pectoris, but pneumonia that brought the
Leicesters down in March.

“And, poor dear!” Pauline said to her husband, “no one knows what she
has borne. And now ...”

She was sitting alone opposite Leicester in the railway carriage; she
was still in furs, for March was by no means done with, and the black,
grey-tipped hairs encircling her porcelain cheeks and chin, the black,
grey-tipped furs crowning her brow, that was like soft and translucent
china, she leaned back in the seat, and was so tiny that her feet did
not touch the floor. Her brows curved out over her eyes; their lashes
curved out and upwards, so that she had an expression of being a newly
awakened and wondering child, and about her lips there hovered always
one of those faint ghosts of smiles that are to other smiles as the
faint odour of pot-pourri is to the scent of roses. Her husband called
her Puff-Ball, because he said a breath of wind would scatter her like
an odorous smoke, gone in a second; but she had acquired her faint
smile whilst tending five very robust children when she had been a
nursery governess. She was twenty-three.

“You see,” she went on, “it was always mother’s ambition--her secret
ambition--to have a white pony and a basket-work open chaise. It must
be a white pony and a basket-work chaise. You know, the New Forest’s
the place where all Admirals go to die, and all their widows always
set up these chaises, just as all the Admirals always have parrots.
Not that I ever considered mother as a widow. I suppose that was
because I hardly saw her at all in her weeds, and I hardly ever saw
her with my father--and yet she was in such an agony of fear whenever
the wind blew, or when the weather was fierce. When it blew in the
Forest, it used to remind her that there might be wind at sea; when it
was a dead calm, she was always convinced that that meant that there
was a particularly vicious cyclone somewhere else. She always seemed
most characteristic when she was sitting bolt upright, with one hand
close to her heart--listening. And I don’t think she was the woman for
father. He was so big and grizzled, and loud and romantic. He used
to shout at her: ‘What’d a puff of wind do to a first-class cruiser?
What’d it do, d’you think?’ It wasn’t that he wasn’t prouder of her
than you are of me. Why, I’ve seen him take her up in his arms and
hoist her towards the ceding, as if she had been a baby, and roar with
laughter. But I don’t think that was very good for mother. And you know
she got her first touch of heart trouble when the _Victoria_ was
rammed. She was in Lyndhurst, and read it on the placards--_Flagship
sunk_: _Admiral and six hundred lives lost_.’ She put her hand
over her heart and fell over backwards. Oh! poor dear!”

Pauline looked at her husband.

“Yes, old boy,” she said, “you don’t know what we women have to suffer.”

He was like a large, pleased spaniel assaulted by a Persian kitten. He
was so slow that he seemed never to get a word out; he was so happy
that he never made the effort. He had promised to stand for Mid-Kent
when they had been married one year, because she declared that he
needed an occupation, and would be tired of her prattle. She said she
could hold him a year; after that he’d have to go out of the house.
And, indeed, she ran on and on, but it was pleasant enough to hear her
as she thought aloud, her mind linking up topic to topic.

“Yes,” she said, “there were father’s speculations, that were as bad
for her as the winds on the sea. He’d roar out: ‘I never put into
anything in any one year more than three-fifths of my year’s screw.
I never did, and I never will. And the wheel’s bound to turn right
side up.’ But it never did, and it never would. And he had expensive
tastes, and there was me to dress. And I’ve seen him sitting with his
chin between his hands. So that when he died his coffin stood in an
empty house--the brokers had cleared it that day. And I was at the
Brigstocks’--up in the nursery.”

Dudley Leicester swore suddenly at Fate that had so misused his
Puff-Ball.

“I’ve never really told you this,” Pauline said, “though I dare say you
knew it.”

“I never knew it,” he said. “By God! I’d like to, ... Well, the most
I knew was, I heard the Brigstocks only gave you three days for your
father’s funeral, and cut it off your holidays next summer.”

“Well, I’ve got to thank them that I never really think of mother as
a widow. I’m glad of that; and there _were_ five children in the
nursery, and only me to look after them.”

Mr. Leicester muttered beneath his breath that they were cursed hogs.

“Well, I’ve got to thank them for _you_!” she said. “For if Mr.
Grimshaw hadn’t come up into the nursery--if he hadn’t been so fond
of children--he’d never have seen me, and so he’d never have helped
mother to patch up her impossible affairs, and get her compassionate
allowance, and keep out of rooms in Hampton Court that she dreaded so.
_You’d_ never have come to Hampton Court. You’ve never been to
Hampton Court in your life.”

“I _have_,” Dudley Leicester asseverated. “When I was a kid I
scratched a wart off my hand on the hollies in the maze; there’s the
scar on the little finger. And I wish you’d call him Robert. I’ve told
you so many times. It’s deuced bad form to call him Mr. Grimshaw.”

Pauline’s lower lip curved inwards.

“Anyhow, mother’s ambition to have a pony was a secret all the time.”

“She might have had fifty ponies if I’d known,” Leicester said.

“But you were engaged to Etta Stackpole all the while,” Pauline mocked
him. “You know you’d have married her if she had not flirted with the
boot-blacks. You’ve told me so many times! And anyhow, she didn’t want
fifty ponies: she only wanted one. And, now I’m off her hands, and
she’s been able to get one--there comes this....”

For Mrs. Lucas, driving out with her pony for the third time in the
Forest, the pony--white, with extreme age--had fallen, and lay still,
and a March storm had come sweeping up from the Solent. So that there
was the pneumonia.

“And the only reason I tell you all this,” Pauline said, “is to make
you very quiet and good, and careful not to knock things over, because
it’s such a tiny box of a place, and you’re such a clumsy creature, and
falling crockery is so bad for a weak heart. I should say it’s worse
than sudden deaths or runaway marriages....”


But Dudley Leicester had no chance of breaking his mother-in-law’s
china. He was fond of standing before her little mantelshelf, and,
with a motion of his shoulder-blades, knocking her blue vases into the
fender, and his dismal contrition then had always been almost worse
for Mrs. Lucas’s nerves than the actual crash and collision. He had
no chance, because the little cottage was full to overflowing. There
were two nurses in attendance; there were a doctor and a specialist at
the moment of the Leicesters’ arrival, and there was only one spare
bedroom, and only one servant. And there was no other dwelling-place
within seven miles. Dudley Leicester was left to imagine that it was
the cold, calm, closely-lipped nurses in their white aprons that seemed
to stand out so stiffly, to take up so much space, and with their
rustlings so to fill the tiny house--that it was they who sent the
quite dismal Dudley Leicester back to town. But no doubt, though she
never let him suspect it, or the shadow of it, it was Pauline. With the
secret consciousness that his presence, though he never went near the
sick-room, was a constant torture to her mother--it was Pauline who
really ejected him from the cottage, who put against the fact that he
was willing to sleep on the sofa or in the loft over the white pony’s
stable the other fact--that Ann, the servant, was terribly overworked
already, with so many extra beds to make, meals to cook, and plates to
wash up. In fact, gay and brave and pleading, Pauline put her hands on
her husband’s chest and pushed him backwards out of the crowded house.
And he never realized that it was she who did it.




IV


SO tall that he looked over most men’s heads, so strong that his
movements must be for ever circumscribed and timid, Dudley Leicester
had never in his life done anything--he had not even been in the
Guards. Least of all did he ever realize personal attitudes in those
around him. The minute jealousies, the very deep hatreds, and the
strong passions that swelled in his particular world of deep idleness,
of high feeling, and of want of occupation--in this world where, since
no man had any need of anything to do, there were so many things to
feel--Dudley Leicester perceived absolutely nothing, no complexities,
no mixed relationships. To him a man was a man, a woman a woman; the
leader in a newspaper was a series of convincing facts, of satisfying
views, and of final ideals. Belonging as he did to the governing
classes, Dudley Leicester had not even the one outlet for passion that
is open to these highly groomed and stall-fed creatures. The tradition
of the public service was in his blood. He owned a slice of his kingdom
that was more than microscopic on the map. But though he had come
into his great possessions at the age of twenty-seven, he made no
effort whatever to put things straight, since he had more than enough
to satisfy his simple needs,--to provide him with a glass bath and
silver taps, to pay his subscription at his club, to give him his three
cigars a day, his box at a music-hall once a week, his month on the
Riviera--and to leave him a thousand or two over every year, which was
the fact most worrying to his existence.

It was Robert Grimshaw who set his estates in order; who found him a
young, hard steward with modern methods; who saw to it that he built
additions to several Church schools, and who directed the steward
to cut down the rent on overburdened farms, to raise other rents,
to provide allotments, to plant heavy land with trees, and to let
the shootings to real advantage. It was, indeed, Robert Grimshaw who
raised Dudley Leicester’s income to figures that in other circumstances
Leicester would have found intolerable. But, on the other hand, it was
Robert Grimshaw who put all the surplus back into the estates, who had
all the gates rehung, all the hedges replanted, all the roofs of the
barns ripped and retiled, and all the cottages rebuilt. And it was
Robert Grimshaw who provided him with his Pauline.

So that at thirty-two, with a wife whom already people regarded as
likely to be the making of him, a model landlord, perfectly sure
of a seat in the House, without a characteristic of any kind or an
enemy in the world, there, gentle and exquisitely groomed, Dudley
Leicester was a morning or so after his return to town. Standing in
front of his mantelshelf in a not too large dining-room of Curzon
Street, he surveyed his breakfast-table with an air of immense
indifference, of immense solitude, and of immense want of occupation.
His shoulder-blades rubbed the glass front of the clock, his hand from
time to time lightly pulled his moustache, his face was empty, but with
an emptiness of depression. He had nothing in the world to do. Nothing
whatever!

So that turning round to take a note from the frame of the mirror
behind him was with him positively an action of immense importance. He
hadn’t a visit to pay to his tailor; there wouldn’t be at his club or
in the Park anyone that he wanted to be talked to by. The one bright
spot in his day was the P---- exercise that he would take just before
lunch in his bath-room before the open window. This interested him.
This really engrossed him. It engrossed him because of his docility,
his instructor having told him that, unless he paid an exact attention
to each motion of his hands and wrists the exercises would cause him
no benefit whatever. He longed immensely for physical benefit, for he
suffered from constant panics and ideas of ill-health. He remembered
that he had an aunt who had been a consumptive; therefore he dreaded
tuberculosis. He had read in some paper that the constant string of
vehicles passing us in the streets of London so acted on the optic
nerves that general paralysis was often induced. Therefore sometimes
he walked along the streets with his eyes shut; he instructed his
chauffeur to drive him from place to place only by way of back
streets and secluded squares, and he abandoned the habit of standing
in the window of his club, which overlooked Piccadilly. Because
Pauline, by diverting his thoughts, diverted also these melancholy
forebodings, he imagined that marriage had done him a great deal
of good. The letter that he took from the mantelshelf contained an
invitation from the Phyllis Trevors to dine that night at the Equator
Club, and to go afterwards to the Esmeralda, the front row of whose
stalls Phyllis Trevors had engaged. That matter was one for deep and
earnest consideration, since Dudley Leicester had passed his last
three evenings at the place of entertainment in question, and was
beginning to feel himself surfeited with its particular attractions.
Moreover, the Phyllis Trevors informed him that Etta Stackpole--now
Lady Hudson--was to be one of the party. But, on the other hand, if he
didn’t go to the Phyllis Trevors, where in the world was he to spend
his evening?

Promptly upon his return to town, he had despatched letters to
the various more stately houses where he and Pauline were to have
dined--letters excusing himself and his wife on account of the extreme
indisposition of his wife’s mother. He dreaded, in fact, to go to a
dinner alone; he was always afraid of being taken ill between the
soup and the fish; he suffered from an unutterable shyness; he was
intolerably afraid of “making an ass of himself.” He felt safe,
however, as long as Pauline had her eyes on him. But the Phyllis
Trevors’ dinners were much more like what he called “a rag.” If he
felt an uncontrollable impulse to do something absurd--to balance, for
instance, a full glass on the top of his head or to flip drops of wine
at his neighbour’s bare shoulders--nobody would be seriously perturbed.
It was not necessary to do either of these things, but you might if you
wanted to; and all the Phyllis Trevors’ women could be trusted either
to put up the conversation for you, or--which was quite as good--to
flirt prodigiously with their neighbours on the other side. The
turning-point of his deliberations, which lasted exactly three-quarters
of an hour, the actual impulse which sent him out of the room to the
telephone in the hall, came from the remembrance that Pauline had made
him promise not to be an irrational idiot.

He had promised to go out to some dinners, and it was only dinners of
the Phyllis Trevors’ sort that he could bring himself to face. So that,
having telephoned his acceptance to Mrs. Trevor, who called him the
Great Chief Long-in-the-fork, and wanted to know why his voice sounded
like an undertaker’s mute, a comparative tranquillity reigned in
Dudley Leicester’s soul. This tranquillity was only ended when at the
dinner-table he had at his side red-lipped, deep-voiced, black-haired,
large, warm, scented, and utterly uncontrollable Etta Stackpole. She
had three dark red roses in her hair.




V


ETTA STACKPOLE--now Lady Hudson--had been Dudley Leicester’s first and
very ardent passion. She was very much his age, and, commencing in a
boy-and-girl affair, the engagement had lasted many years. She was the
only daughter of the Stackpoles of Cove Place, and she had all the
wilfulness of an only daughter, and all the desperate acquisitiveness
of the Elizabethan freebooters from whom she was descended. Robert
Grimshaw said once that her life was a series of cutting-out
expeditions; her maids used to declare that they certainly could not
trust their young men in the hall if Miss Etta was likely to come down
the stairs. It was perhaps her utter disrespect for the dictates of
class that made Dudley Leicester finally and quite suddenly break off
from her.

It was not exactly the case that he had caught her flirting with a
boot-black. The man was the son of the farrier at Cove, and he had the
merit of riding uncommonly straight to hounds. Dudley Leicester--one
of those men who are essentially monogamous--had suffered unheard-of
agonies at hunt balls, in grand stands; he had known the landscape
near the Park to look like hell; he had supported somehow innumerable
Greshams, Hewards, Traceys, Stackpole cousins, and Boveys. But the name
of Bugle stuck in his gorge. “Bugle: Farrier,” was printed in tarnished
gold capitals over the signboard of the vet’s front-door! It had made
him have a little sick feeling that he had never had before. And that
same afternoon Etta’s maid Agnes had come to him, her cheeks distorted
with pitiful rage, to ask him for mercy’s sake to marry Miss Etta
soon, or she herself would never get married. She said that her young
man--her third young man that it had happened to--had got ideas above
his place because of the way Miss Etta spoke to him whilst he waited
at table. So that it wasn’t even only the farrier; it was the third
footman too. His name was Moddle....

That very afternoon--it had been six years before--Dudley Leicester had
announced his departure. He had, indeed, announced it to the maid Agnes
first of all. It broke out of him, such a hot rage overcoming him that
he, too, very tall and quivering, forgot the limits of class.

“I’m sorry for you, Agnes,” he had blurted out; “I’m sorry for myself;
but I shall never marry Miss Stackpole.” The girl had taken her apron
down from her eyes to jump for joy.

And very gradually--the process had taken years--hot rage had given way
to slow dislike, and that to sullen indifference. He sat at her side
at the dinner-table, and she talked to him--about concerts! She had a
deep, a moving, a tragic voice, and when she talked to her neighbour
it was with so much abandonment always that she appeared to be about
to lay her head upon his black shoulder and to rest her white breasts
upon the tablecloth. She perfumed herself always with a peculiar, musky
scent that her father, years ago, had discovered in Java.

“Bodya,” she would say, “has the tone of heaven itself; it’s better
than being at the best after-theatre supper in the world with the
best man in the world. But he uses his bow like a cobbler stitching.
If I shut my eyes La Jeuiva makes me use all the handkerchiefs I
can get hold of. _Real_ tears! ... But to look at, she’s like
a bad kodak--over-exposed and under-developed. She shouldn’t be so
_décolletée_, and she ought to sing in a wood at night. We’ve had
her do it down at Well-lands....

“But,” she added, “I dare say you never go to concerts now.”

“I haven’t been to one since the ones I went to with you,” Dudley said
grimly.

“Ah!” she said. “Don’t you remember our last? It was a Monday Pop. We
were passing through town, all the lot of us, from the East Kent to
Melton. What a lot of frost there was that year! Don’t you remember?
It was so hard on the Monday that we didn’t go down to the Shires, but
stayed up instead. And there was the quartette with Joachim and Strauss
and Ries and Piatti! I wonder what they played? I’ve got the programme
still. Those quaint old green programmes! I’ll look it up and let you
know. But oh, it’s all gone! They’re all dead; there are no Pops now
and St. James’s Hall.... And yet it only seems yesterday.... Don’t you
remember how dear old Piatti’s head looked exactly like the top of his
‘cello in shape?”


Dudley Leicester, gazing rigidly at the tablecloth, was at that moment
wondering how Etta Hudson got on with her footman. For as a matter of
fact, Dudley Leicester’s thoughts, if they were few and if they rose
very slowly in his rather vacant mind, were yet almost invariably of a
singular justnesss. He had broken off the habit of Etta Stackpole, who,
like many troublesome but delightful things, had become a habit to be
broken off. And Dudley Leicester had, as it were, chopped her off in
the very middle because of a train of thought. She could carry on with
the Traceys, the Greshams, the Stackpole cousins and the rest. If it
pained him he could yet just bear it, for he imagined that he would be
able to defend his hearth against them. But when it had come to Bugle,
the farrier’s son, and to Moddle, the third footman, it had suddenly
come into his head that you couldn’t keep these creatures off your
hearth. He knew it had been as impossible as it would be sickening....

So whilst Etta Stackpole talked he had been wondering, not only how
Lady Hudson got on with her footman, but how Sir William liked it.
Sir William Hudson was the Managing Director of the Great Southern
Railway Company. As far as Dudley Leicester knew, he passed his time in
travelling from one end of the world to the other, whilst Etta carried
on her cutting-out expeditions from a very snug harbour in Curzon
Street, or from the very noble property known as Well-lands in Surrey.
But, indeed, although the Leicesters and the Hudsons lived in the same
street, their points of contact were almost non-existent, and since
their rupture Dudley Leicester and Etta Stackpole had never met. His
mother, indeed, who had managed his estate a little too economically
till her death three years ago, had let Hangham, the Leicesters’ place,
which was just next door to Cove Park, and Etta, perhaps because she
thought it was full time, or perhaps because she had stipulated for
some agreeable arrangement with Sir William, had almost immediately
“made a match” with the director of railways. And although it would
be hard to say what was Dudley Leicester’s “line,” we may put it
down in his own words that railway directors were not in it. But
vaguely and without much interest, at odd moments Dudley Leicester had
gathered--it is impossible to know how one does gather these things, or
perhaps Robert Grimshaw had really formulated the idea for his simple
brain--that the Hudsons were one of several predatory and semi-detached
couples. They didn’t interfere apparently with each other. They hit
where they liked, like what used to be called “chain shot,” dangerous
missiles consisting of two cannon-balls chained one to the other and
whirling through Society. Robert Grimshaw had certainly gained this
impression from his two friends, the Senhora de Bogota and Madame de
Mauvesine, the wives of two of the diplomatic body in London, two
ladies who, though they were upon the most intimate of terms with Etta
Hudson, were yet in a perpetual state of shocked and admiring envy. It
was as if, witnessing Etta’s freedom, these ladies of Latin origin and
comparatively circumscribed liberties, rubbed their eyes and imagined
that they had been allowed to witness scenes from a fairyland--from
a veritable Island of the Blessed. They couldn’t imagine how it was
possible to be married and yet to be so absolutely free. They couldn’t,
indeed, imagine how it was possible to be so absolutely free in any
state, whether married, single, or any of the intermediary stages. And,
indeed, Senhora de Bogota, at that moment opposite them at the table,
was leaning across the little blonde man who was always known as Mr.
“Phyllis” Trevor, for much the same reason that Dudley Leicester came
afterwards to be known as Mr. “Pauline” Leicester--Senhora de Bogota
was leaning, a splendid mass of dark and opulent flesh, across her
diminutive neighbour’s form to whisper with a strong Brazilian accent
to Madame de Mauvesine:

“Regardez donc cette Etta! Ces Anglaises, a-t-on jamais vu rien de
pareilles!”

And Madame de Mauvesine, blonde with coppery hair and a peaked, almost
eel-like face, raised her eyes to heaven, or rather to the ceiling that
was painted to resemble a limpid blue sky filled with chains of roses
and gambolling cherubs.




VI


ETTA STACKPOLE raised herself in the hansom that carried them home from
the Esmeralda. She lifted her white hand above the roof, and the horse,
checked suddenly, came to a vacillating halt at the kerb. They were
midway in the curve of Regent Street, and it was about half-past twelve
of a fine night.

“We’re getting home much too fast,” she said to the wordless Dudley
Leicester. “There’s such oceans to remember yet.”

It was as if, years before, he had been married to a masterful woman.
He could no more control her to-day than he could then. He saw her bend
forward, lithe, large and warm, push open the apron of the cab, and the
next moment she was on the pavement. He thought so slowly that he had
no time to think anything at all before he found himself, too, on the
kerbstone, reaching up coins to the shadowy and thankful driver.

“I say, you know,” he said, “if anybody saw us ...”

She hooked herself on to his arm.

“I don’t believe,” she said, “that I did shriek on the switchback at
Earl’s Court. It’s seventeen years ago now, and I was only fourteen at
the time. But I’ve always said I never shrieked in my life.” She moved
herself half round him, so that she seemed about to envelop him in her
black dress and hood, in order to gaze into his face. Her features
appeared long, white, and seductive: her voice was very deep and full
of chords.

“Whatever you can say against me ...” she began and paused.

Regent Street was very much as empty or as full as it always is at that
hour, the tall lamps sparkling, the hoofs of very few horses sounding
in cadence to innumerable whispers in polyglot tongues.

“You don’t know who will see us,” Dudley repeated. He was conscious
that, as they passed, groups and individuals swung round to gaze upon
them.

“Whatever you may say against me,” her deep voice came, “you can’t say
I’ve ever been untruthful, and I’ve always said I never shrieked in my
life.”

“You did then,” Dudley Leicester asseverated. “And we were alone in the
car; it was not anyone else.”

They were at the top of Vigo Street, and suddenly she swung him round.

“Oh, if you’re afraid to be seen,” she said, “let’s go down the back
streets. They’re as empty as sin, and as black. As to my shrieking, you
can’t prove it. But I can prove that you called me a penguin in your
last nice letter to me.”

In the black and tortuous streets, in the chilly and silent night, her
warmth as she clung to him seemed to envelop him, and her subtle and
comfortable Eastern perfume was round them, as it were an invisible
cloud. He appeared to hang back a little, and she, leaning her body
forward, her face back to him, to draw him along, as in a picture a
nymph might lead away a stripling into scented obscurities into leafy
woods.

“I might say,” Dudley Leicester was urged to a sudden lucidity, “that I
couldn’t have called you a penguin because I never rightly knew what a
penguin was.”

“Oh, but you did once,” she said. “It is one of the things you have
forgotten.” She laughed. “So many things you had forgotten, but you are
remembering them now.”

She laughed again.

“Now you’ll remember how you came to know what a penguin was. On that
day--the day of the evening we went to the Monday Pop--we went to
the Zoo. It was you who wanted to go there to be alone with me; you
considered that the Zoo in that weather would be the most solitary
place in London--the hard frost that it was. Colder than this, colder
than you are now. You’re thawing a little, you stiff creature....”

She shivered under her cloak.

“We stopped most of the time with the monkeys, but we saw the penguins,
too. Don’t you remember?”

“I don’t,” he answered. “I don’t want to. It would not have been like
me to call you a penguin. You’re not like one.”

“Ah,” she said, “when you’re in love you don’t bother about likenesses.
I’ll bet you called your wife a penguin before you married her, or a
tooth-brush, or a puff-ball. I’ve heard that men always transfer their
pet names from woman to woman.”

He attempted to blurt out that she was to leave Pauline out of it, but
she cried:

“Oh, you traitor! You _have_ called her one of these names.
Couldn’t you have kept them sacred? Isn’t anything sacred to a man? I
loved you so, and you loved me. And then...”

The memory of their past lives came suddenly over him.

“Go away,” she said--“go away.”

“I must see you to your door,” he muttered, with a sense of guilt, and
stood irresolutely, for she had torn her arm from his.

“I don’t want you,” she called out. “Can’t I walk twenty steps without
you?” And she began to glide swiftly away, with him doggedly on the
very edge of the pavement beside her.

Suddenly she slackened her steps.

“What did you give me up for, Dudley Leicester?” she said. “What did
you do it for? I cared more for your little finger than for all the
heads of all the other men. You knew it well enough. You know it
now. You _feel_ like a coward. Don’t tell me you feared for the
sanctity of your hearth. You knew me well enough. What I was then I am
now.”

She paused, and then she brought out:

“I’ve always wanted men about me, and I mean to have them. You never
heard me say a good word for a woman, and I never did say one. I
shouldn’t even of your wife. But I am Etta Stackpole, I tell you. The
world has got to give me what I want, for it can’t get on without me.
Your women might try to down me, but your men wouldn’t allow it.”

Dudley Leicester murmured apologetically, feeling himself a hypocrite:
“Why should anyone want to down you?”

“The women would,” she answered. “If ever my name got into the papers
they’d manage it too. But that will never happen. You know women are
quite powerless until your name does get into the papers. Mine never
will; that’s as certain as eggs is eggs. And even if it did, there’s
half the hostesses in London would try to bolster me up. Where would
their dinners be--where would the Phyllis Trevors be if they hadn’t me
for an attraction? ...”

“I’m telling you all this, Dudley,” she said, “just to show you
what you’ve missed. You’re a bit of a coward, Dudley Leicester, and
you threw me over in a panic. You’re subject to panics now, aren’t
you--about your liver and the like? But when you threw me over, Dudley,
it was the cowardliest thing you ever did.”

Walking at her side, now that she had repulsed him, Dudley Leicester
had the sensation of being deserted and cold. He had, too, the impulse
to offer her his arm again and the desire to come once more within the
circle of warmth and perfume that she threw out. The quiet, black,
deserted streets, with the gleam from lamps in the shining black glass
of windows, the sound of his footsteps--for her tread was soundless, as
if she moved without stepping--the cold, the solitude, all these things
and her deep-thrilled voice took him out of himself, as if into some
other plane. It was, perhaps, into a plane of the past, for that long,
early stage of his life cast again its feeling over him. He tried to
remember Pauline; but it was with a sense of duty, and memory will not
act at the bidding of duty.

No man, indeed, can serve two women--no man, at any rate, who is
essentially innocent, and who is essentially monogamous as was Dudley
Leicester.

“... The cowardliest thing you ever did in your life,” he heard her
repeat, and it was as if in trying to remember Pauline, he were
committing a new treachery to Etta Stackpole.

“... For it wasn’t because you were afraid of my betraying you--you
knew I shouldn’t betray you--it was because you were afraid of what the
other women would say. You knew I should be justified in my actions,
but you were afraid of their appearance. You’re a hypochondriac, Dudley
Leicester. You had a panic. One day you will have a panic, and it will
pay you out for dropping me. It’ll do more than pay you out. You think
you’ve taken a snug sort of refuge in the arms of a little wife who
might be a nun out of a convent, but it’ll find you.”

Dudley Leicester swore inwardly because there was an interval of a
sob in her rounded speech. He experienced impulses to protect, to
apologize, to comfort her. She became the only thing in the world.

“And it’s because you know how bitterly you wronged me,” she continued,
“that you behaved gloomily towards me. I wouldn’t have spoken like
this if you hadn’t been such an oaf at dinner, but it’s up to me; you
put it up to me and I’m doing it. If you’d played the game--if you
had pretended to be cordial, or even if you’d been really a little
sheepish--I might have spared you. But now you’ve got to see it
through....

“But no,” she added suddenly, “here endeth the first lesson. I think
you’ve had enough gruel....”

“All the same,” she added as suddenly and quite gaily, “you _did_
call me a penguin in the last nice letter you wrote me.”

He was by now so far back into his past that he seemed to be doing no
more than “see Etta home”--as he had seen her home a thousand times
before. It only added to the reality of it that she had suddenly
reconciled herself to him after finally upbraiding him. For, when they
had been engaged, she had upbraided him as fiercely at least a hundred
times--after each of her desperate flirtations, when he had been filled
with gloom. And always--always--just as now, she had contrived to put
him in the wrong. Always after these quarrels he had propitiated her
with a little present of no value.

And suddenly he found himself thinking that next day he would send her
a bunch of jonquils!

He was, indeed, as innocent as a puppy; he was just “seeing Etta home”
again. And he had always seen her home before with such an innocence of
tender passion, that once more the tenderness arose in him. It found
its vent in his saying:

“You know you’ll catch cold if you let your hood fall back like that.”

“Then put it up for me,” she said saucily.

Her hood had fallen on to her shoulders, and in the March night her
breasts gleamed. Both her hands were occupied with her skirts. He
trembled--as he had been used to tremble--when his hands touched her
warm and scented hair, whose filaments caressed his wrists. In the
light of a lamp her eyes gleamed mockingly.

“Do you remember the riddle with the rude answer?” she asked suddenly,
“about the hare. There was a hare in a pit, sixty feet deep, and there
was no way out, and a greyhound was let into it. How did the hare
escape. And the answer was: That’s the hare’s business.”

She had hooked herself on to his arm again.

“What’s that got to do with it?” he asked thinkingly.

“Oh,” she answered, “I was only thinking; it _is_ the bare’s
business, you know. That means that you can’t really get away from
your past. It comes back again. Do you remember a French story
called ‘Toutes les Amoureuses’? ... about a man who had hundreds of
adventures. And of each lady he kept a ribbon or a lock of hair, or a
shoe-buckle--some trifle. And once a year he used to lock his door and
take out these odds and ends--and remember--just remember! Well, Mr.
Dudley Leicester, that’s a good thing to do. It’s an act of piety for
one thing; it averts evil for another. It’s like touching for the evil
chance. If you’d done that for me--for my sake, because you had a good
slice of my life--if you had done it ... well! you’d not have been so
desperately unhappy now.”

“I’m not unhappy,” he said, and he spoke the truth.

“Aren’t you?” she mocked him. “Aren’t you?”

They were within a few steps of her door, almost opposite where, black
and silent, his own house awaited him--as if, reproachfully, it gazed
at him with darkened eyes. And suddenly she burst into a carol, and
with quickened steps she danced him onwards:

    “He called me a penguin, a penguin, a penguin;
    He called me a penguin a long time ago!”

She sang it to the triumphant hit of “Voici le sabre!” And then they
were on her doorstep. She had her key in the latch, the door went back
into darkness.

“I’ll prove to you you called me that,” she said, and crouching
forward, as she had bent to open the door, she caught the end of his
sleeve and pulled him into the inner darkness. He could see nothing,
and the heavy door was closed behind him.





PART II




I


AND suddenly, in the thick darkness, whirring as if it were a scream,
intermitted for a moment and again commencing, a little bell rang out
at Dudley Leicester’s elbow. As suddenly, but with a more gracious
diffusion, light welled down from above his head, and Etta Hudson’s
voice mingling with it:

“Stop that confounded thing! I don’t want all the servants in the house
to know you are here.”

She leaned over the white and ormolu banisters: the light swinging over
her head made a halo above her disordered hair; her white shoulders
gleamed.

“Stop it,” she said; “Don’t fumble so ridiculously. Don’t you know how
to take the thing off the hooks?”

She laughed at him derisively; her face disappeared as if she were
about to continue her upward journey. Then once more she was looking
down at him:

“Tell whoever it is,” she said, “that Sir William is in Paris and
Lady Hudson in bed. Say ‘sir’ when you speak, and they’ll think it’s
the second footman, Moddle! Don’t you remember Moddle?” And again she
laughed, and her ascent of the stairs was marked by the tips of her
fingers, visible as if they were little white and creeping mice.

Dudley Leicester put the receiver to his ear. A peremptory “Are you
4,259 Mayfair?” made him suddenly afraid, as if a schoolmaster had
detected him in some crime. Hitherto he had had no feeling of crime. It
was as if he had merely existed in the tide of his senses. An equally
peremptory “_Don’t go away_” was succeeded by the words: “Get
down,” and then:

“Is that Sir William Hudson’s?”

Leicester answered--he had the words clearly fixed in his mind--but
already he was panting:

“Yes, but Sir William’s in Paris, and Lady Hudson in bed.” And he did
not omit to add “sir.”

Through his mind, quickened by his emotions of fear, there shot the
idea that now they must go away; that it was all over; that he was very
tired; that he must sit down and rest.

Then suddenly--still low, distinct, stealthy, and clear--the voice of
the invisible man asked:

“Isn’t that Dudley Leicester speaking?”

He answered “Yes,” and then with a sudden panic he hung the receiver
upon the hooks.

And Etta Hudson, descending the stair with the letter in her hand, saw
him sitting dishevelled and dejected, as if all his joints had been
broken, in the messenger-boy’s chair beside the heavy, dark table.

He rose suddenly, exclaiming: “You’ve got me into this scrape; you’ve
got to get me out of it. What’s to be done?”

Standing on the bottom step of the stairs, she laughed at him, and she
laughed still more while she listened:

“How do I know who it was?” He poured forth disjointed sentences. “I
told you somebody would see us in Regent Street. It might have been
your husband, or some blackmailer. London’s full of them. I can’t
possibly ring them up again to ask who it was. Perhaps they spoke from
a call-office. What’s to be done? What in the name of God is to be
done?”

A certain concern and pity were visible in her eyes: she opened her
lips and was about to speak, when he exclaimed:

“It would break Pauline’s heart. What’s to be done?”

The line of her brows hardened, and she uttered a hard little laugh.

“Don’t you know,” she said; “why, my dear Dudley, the answer is:
‘That’s the bare’s business.’”


His first action on awakening was always to stretch out his hand for
the letters that his silent man would have placed by his side, and to
glance at the clock on his dressing table to see how many hours he had
slept. And, indeed, next morning his first sensation was one of bodily
well-being and of satisfaction because the clock appeared to inform him
that he had slept for three hours longer than was his habit. But with
a slight feeling of uneasiness he remembered how late he had been the
night before, and stretching out his hand for the letters, he heard a
voice say:

“Are you 4,259 Mayfair?”

He had answered “What?” before he realized that this question was
nothing more than a very vivid recollection. But even when he had
assured himself that it was only a very vivid recollection, he lay
still and discovered that his heart was beating very quickly. And so
afraid was he that the motion of stretching out his arm would bring
again the voice to his ears, that he lay still, his hand stretched
along the counterpane. And suddenly he got up.

He opened one white-painted cupboard, then the other. Finally, he
went to the door of the room and peered out. His man, expressionless,
carrying over his arm a pair of trousers, and in one hand a white
letter crossed with blue, was slowly ascending the staircase at the end
of the corridor.

“You didn’t ask me a question,” Dudley Leicester said, “about two
minutes ago?”

Saunders said: “No, sir, I was answering the door to the postman. This,
sir.” And he held out the registered letter.

It was as if Dudley Leicester recoiled from it. It bore Pauline’s
handwriting, a large, round, negligent scrawl.

“Did he ask our number?” Dudley inquired eagerly; and Saunders, with as
much of surprise as could come into his impassive face, answered:

“Why, no, sir; he’s the regular man.”

“Our telephone number, I mean,” Dudley Leicester said.

Saunders was by this time in the room, passing through it to the door
of the bath-cabinet.

“As a matter of fact, sir,” he said, “the only thing he asked was
whether Mrs. Leicester’s mother was any better.”

“It’s very odd,” Dudley Leicester answered. And with Saunders splashing
the water in the white bath-cabinet, with a touch of sun lighting up
the two white rooms--in the midst of these homely and familiar sounds
and reflections, fear suddenly seized Dudley Leicester. His wife’s
letter frightened him; when there fell from it a bracelet, he started
as he had never in his life started at a stumble of his horse. He
imagined that it was a sort of symbol, a sending back of his gifts. And
even when he had read her large, sparse words, and discovered that the
curb chain of the bracelet was broken, and Pauline desired him to take
it to the jeweller’s to be repaired--even then the momentary relief
gave way to a host of other fears. For Dudley Leicester had entered
into a world of dread.




II


HE appeared to have become friendless and utterly solitary. Even his
man Saunders, to whom he had been attached as he had been attached
to his comfortable furniture and his comfortable boots, seemed to
him now to be grown reserved, frigid, disapproving. He imagined that
Saunders had a threatening aspect. Fear suddenly possessed his heart
when he perceived, seated in the breakfast-room, well forward in a deep
saddle-bag chair, with Peter the dachshund between his speckless boots,
Robert Grimshaw.

“What have you come for?” Leicester asked; “what’s it about?”

Robert Grimshaw raised his dark, seal-like eyes, and Leicester seemed
to read in them reproof, judgment, condemnation.

“To leave Peter with the excellent Saunders,” Robert Grimshaw said; “I
can’t take him to Athens.”

“Oh, you’re going to Athens?” Dudley Leicester said, and oddly it came
into his mind that he was glad Grimshaw was going to Athens. He wanted
Grimshaw not to hear of his disgrace.

For although Grimshaw had frequently spoken dispassionately of
unfaithful husbands--dispassionately, as if he were registering
facts that are neither here nor there, facts that are the mere
inevitabilities of life, he had the certainty, the absolute certainty,
that Grimshaw would condemn him.

“I start at one, you know,” Grimshaw said. “You’re not looking very
bright.”

Dudley Leicester sat down before his coffeepot; his hand, with an
automatic motion, went out to the copy of the _Times_, which was
propped between the toast-rack and the cream-jug; but it suddenly shot
back again, and with a hang-dog look in his eyes he said:

“How long does it take things to get into the newspapers?”

It was part of his sensation of loneliness and of fear that he could
not any more consult Robert Grimshaw. He might ask him questions, but
he couldn’t tell just what question wouldn’t give him away. Robert
Grimshaw had so many knowledges; so that when Robert Grimshaw asked:

“What sort of things?” he answered, with a little fluster of hurry and
irritation:

“Oh, any sort of thing; the things they do print.”

Grimshaw raised his eyelids.

“I don’t see how I can be expected to know about newspapers,” he said;
“but I fancy they get printed about half-past one in the morning--about
half-past one. I shouldn’t imagine it was any earlier.”

At this repetition, at this emphasis of the hour at which the
telephone-bell had rung, Dudley seized and opened his paper with a
sudden eagerness. He had the conviction that it must have been a
newspaper reporter who had rung him up, and that by now the matter
might well’be in print. He looked feverishly under the heading of Court
and Society, and under the heading of Police Court and Divorce Court.
But his eye could do no more than travel over the spaces of print and
speckled paper, as if it had been a patterned fabric. And suddenly he
asked:

“Do you suppose the servants spy upon us?”

“Really, my dear fellow,” Grimshaw said, “why can’t you buy an
encyclopædia of out-of-the-way things?”

“But _do_ you?” Dudley insisted.

“I don’t know,” Grimshaw speculated. “Some do; some don’t. It depends
on their characters; on whether it would be worth their whiles. I’ve,
never heard of an authentic case of a servant blackmailing a master,
but, of course, one would not hear of it.”

“But your man Jervis? Or Saunders, now? They talk about us, for
instance, don’t they?”

Grimshaw considered the matter with his eyes half closed.

“Jervis? Saunders?” he said. “Yes, I suppose they do. I _hope_
they do, for we’re their life’s work, and if they take the interest
in us that I presume they do, they ought to talk about us. I imagine
Jervis discusses me now and then with his wife. I should think he does
it affectionately, on the whole. I don’t know.... It’s one of the few
things that are as mysterious as life and death. There are these people
always about us--all day, all night. They’ve got eyes--I suppose they
use them. But we’ve got no means of knowing what they think or what
they know. I do know a lot--about other people. Jervis gives me the
news while he’s shaving me. So I suppose I know nearly all he knows
about other people. He knows I like to know, and it’s part of what he’s
paid for. But as for what he knows about me”--Grimshaw waved his hand
as if he were flicking cigarette-ash off his knee--“why, I know nothing
about that. We never can; we never shall. But we never can and we never
shall know what anyone in the world knows of us and thinks. You’ll
find, as you go on, that you’ll never really know all that Pauline
thinks of you--not quite all. I shall never really know all that you
think about me. I suppose we’re as intimate as men can be in this
world, aren’t we? Well! You’re probably at this very moment thinking
something or other about me. Perhaps I’m boring you or irritating you,
but you won’t tell me. And,” he added, fixing his eyes gently and
amiably upon Dudley Leicester’s face, “you’ll never know all I know
about you.”

Dudley Leicester had become filled with an impetuous dread that he had
“given himself away” by his questions.

“Why I asked,” he said, and his eyes avoided Grimshaw’s glance, “is
that the postman seems to have been talking to Saunders about Pauline.”

Grimshaw started suddenly forward in his seat.

“Oh,” Dudley Leicester said, “it’s only that I asked Saunders about a
voice I had heard, and he said it was the postman asking when Pauline
would be home, or how her mother was. Something of that soft. It seems
rather impertinent of these chaps.”

“It seems to me rather nice,” Grimshaw said, “if you look at it without
prejudice. We may as well suppose that both Saunders and the postman
are decent fellows, and Pauline is so noticeable and so nice that it’s
only natural that an old servant and an old postman should be concerned
if she’s upset. After all, you know we do live in a village, and if we
don’t do any harm, I don’t see why we should take it for granted that
these people crab us. You’ve got to be talked about, old man, simply
because you’re there. Everyone is talked about--all of us.”

Dudley Leicester said, with a sudden and hot gloom:

“There’s nothing about me to talk about. I’ve never wanted to be an
interesting chap, and I never have been. I shall give Saunders the sack
and report the postman.”

“Oh, come now,” Grimshaw said. “I know it’s in human nature to dislike
the idea of being talked about. It used to give me the creeps to think
that all around me in the thousands and thousands of people that one
knows, every one of them probably says something of me. But, after all,
it all averages out. Some say good, no doubt, and some dislike me,
and say it. I don’t suppose I can go out of my door without the baker
at the corner knowing it. I am spied upon by all the policemen in the
streets round about. No doubt half the shop-assistants in Bond Street
snigger at the fact that I help two or three women to choose their
dresses and their bracelets, and sometimes pay their bills, but what
does it all amount to?”

“Hell,” Dudley Leicester said--“sheer hell!”

“Oh, well, eat your breakfast,” Grimshaw replied. “You can’t change it.
You’ll get used to it in time. Or if you don’t get used to it in time,
I’ll tell you what to do. I’ll tell you what I do. People have got to
talk about you. If they don’t know things they’ll invent lies. Tell ’em
the truth. The truth is never very bad. There’s my man Jervis. I’ve
said to him: ‘You can open all my letters; you can examine my pass-book
at the bank; you can pay my bills; you’re at liberty to read my diary
of engagements; you can make what use you like of the information. If
I tried to stop you doing these things, I know I should never succeed,
because you chaps are always on the watch, and we’re bound to nod at
times. Only I should advise you, Jervis,’ I said, ‘to stick to truth
in what you say about me. It don’t matter a tinker’s curse to me what
you do say, but you’ll get a greater reputation for reliability if what
you say always proves true.’ So there I am. Of course it’s an advantage
to have no vices in particular, and to have committed no crimes. But I
don’t think it would make much difference to me, and it adds immensely
to the agreeableness of life not to want to conceal things. You can’t
conceal things. It’s a perpetual strain. Do what you want, and take
what you get for doing it. It’s the only way to live. If you tell the
truth people may invent a bit, but they won’t invent so much. When you
were married, I told Hartley Jenx that if you hadn’t married Pauline,
I should have. Everybody’s pretty well acquainted with that fact. If
I’d tried to conceal it, people would have been talking about my coming
here three times a week. As it is, it is open as the day. Nobody talks.
I know they don’t. Jervis would have told me. He’d be sure to know.”

“What’s all that got to do with it?” Dudley Leicester said with a
suspicious exasperation.

Robert Grimshaw picked up on to his arm Peter the dachshund, that all
the while had remained immobile, save for an occasional blinking of the
eyelids, between his feet. Holding the dog over his arm, he said:

“Now, I am going to confide Peter to Saunders. That was the arrangement
I made with Pauline, so that he shouldn’t worry you. But you can take
this as a general principle: ‘Let your servants know all that there
is to know about you, but if you find they try to take advantage of
you--if they try to blackmail you--hit them fair and square between
the jaws.’ Yes, I mean it, literally and physically. You’ve got mettle
enough behind your fists.”

Robert Grimshaw desired to speak to Saunders in private, because of
one of those small financial transactions which the decencies require
should not be visible between guest and master and man. He wanted, too,
to give directions as to the feeding of Peter during his absence; but
no sooner had the door closed upon him than Dudley Leicester made after
him to open it. For he was seized by a sudden and painful aversion
from the thought that Saunders should be in private communication with
Robert Grimshaw. He strongly suspected that Saunders knew where he
had spent those hours of the night--Saunders, with his mysterious air
of respectful reserve--and it drove him nearly crazy to think that
Saunders should communicate this fact to Robert Grimshaw. It wasn’t
that he feared Grimshaw’s telling tales to Pauline. It was that he
dreaded the reproach that he imagined would come into Robert Grimshaw’s
dark eyes; for he knew how devoted Grimshaw was to his wife. He had his
hand upon the handle of the door; he withdrew it at the thought that
interference would appear ridiculous. He paused and stood irresolute,
his face distorted by fear, and his body bent as if with agony.
Suddenly he threw the door open, and, striding out, came into collision
with Ellida Langham. Later, the feeling of relief that he had not
uttered what was just on the tip of his tongue--the words: “Has Pauline
sent you? How did she hear it?”--the feeling of relief that he had not
uttered these words let him know how overwhelming his panic had been.
Ellida, however, was bursting into voluble speech:

“Katya’s coming back!” she said. “Katya’s coming back. She’s on one of
the slow ships from Philadelphia, with an American. She may be here any
day, and I did so want to let Toto know before he started for Athens.”

She was still in black furs, with a black veil, but her cheeks were
more flushed than usual, and her eyes danced.

“Think of Katya’s coming back!” she said, but her lower lip suddenly
quivered. “Toto hasn’t _started_?” she asked. “His train doesn’t
go till one.”

She regarded Dudley Leicester with something of impatience. She said
afterwards that she had never before noticed he was goggle-eyed. He
stood, enormously tall, his legs very wide apart, gazing at her with
his mouth open.

“I’m not a ghost, man,” she said at last. “What’s wrong with you?”

Dudley Leicester raised his hand to his straw-coloured moustache.

“Grimshaw’s talking to Saunders,” he said.

Ellida looked at him incredulously. But eventually her face cleared.
“Oh, about Peter?” she said. “I was beginning to think you’d got an
inquest in the house....”

And suddenly she touched Dudley Leicester vigorously on the arm.

“Come! Get him up from wherever he is,” she said, with a good-humoured
vivacity. “Katya’s more important than Peter, and I’ve got the largest
number of things to tell him in the shortest possible time.”

Dudley Leicester, in his dull bewilderment, was veering round upon
his straddled legs, gazing first helplessly at the bell beside the
chimney-piece and then at the door. Even if he hadn’t been already
bewildered, he would not have known very well how properly to summon a
friend who was talking to a servant of his own. Did you ring, or did
you go to the top of the stairs and call? But his bewilderment was
cut short by the appearance of Grimshaw himself, and at the sight of
his serene face just lighting up with a little smile of astonishment
and pleasure, Dudley Leicester’s panic vanished as suddenly and
irrationally as it had fallen on him. He even smiled, while Ellida
Langham said, with a sharp, quick little sound, “Boo!” in answer to
Robert’s exclamation of “Ellida!” But Grimshaw took himself up quickly,
and said:

“Ah! I know you’ve some final message for me, and you went round to my
rooms, and Jervis told you I’d come on here.”

She was quite a different Ellida from the plaintive lady in the Park.
Her lips were parted, her eyes sparkled, and she held her arms behind
her back as if she were expecting a dog to jump up at her.

“Ah! You think you know everything, Mr. Toto,” she said; “but, _je
vous le donne en mille_, you don’t know what I’ve come to tell you.”

“I know it’s one of two things,” Grimshaw said, smiling: “Either
Kitty’s spoken, or else Katya has.”

“Oh, she’s more than spoken,” Ellida cried out. “She’s coming. In three
days she’ll be here.”

Robert Grimshaw reflected for a long time.

“You did what you said you would?” he asked at last.

“I did what I said I would,” she repeated. “I appealed to her sense
of duty. I said that, if she was so good in the treatment of obscure
nervous diseases--and you know the head-doctor-man over there said she
was as good a man as himself--it was manifestly her duty, her duty to
mother’s memory, to take charge of mother’s only descendant--that’s
Kitty--and this is her answer: She’s coming--she’s coming with a
patient from Philadelphia.... Oh! she’s coming. Katya’s coming again.
Won’t it make everything different?”

She pulled Robert Grimshaw by the buttonhole over to the window, and
began to speak in little sibilant whispers.

And it came into Dudley Leicester’s head to think that, if Katya
Lascarides was so splendid in the treatment of difficult cases, she
might possibly be able to advise him as to some of the obscure maladies
from which he was certain that he suffered.

Robert Grimshaw was departing that day for the city of Athens, where
for two months he was to attend to the business of the firm of Peter
Lascarides and Co., of which he was a director.




III


WITH her eyes on the grey pinnacles of the Scillies, Katya Lascarides
rose from her deck-chair, saying to Mrs. Van Husum:

“I am going to send a marconigram.”

Mrs. Van Husum gave a dismal but a healthy groan. It pleased Katya,
since it took the place of the passionately pleading “Oh, don’t leave
me--don’t leave me!” to which Katya Lascarides had been accustomed for
many months. It meant that her patient had arrived at a state of mind
so normal that she was perfectly fit to be left to the unaided care of
her son and daughter-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Clement P. Van Husum junior,
who resided at Wantage. Indeed, Mrs. Van Husum’s groan was far more the
sound of an elderly lady recovering from the troubles of sea-sickness
than that which would be made by a neurotic sufferer from the dread of
solitude.

Katya, with her tranquil and decided step, moved along the deck and
descended the companion forward to where the Marconi installation sent
out its cracklings from a little cabin surrounded by what appeared a
schemeless jumble of rusty capstans and brown cables. With the same
air of pensive introspection and tranquil resolve she leaned upon the
little slab that was devoted to the sender of telegrams, and wrote
to her sister Ellida, using the telegraphic address of her husband’s
office:

 “Shall reach London noon to-morrow. Beg you not to meet ship or to
 come to hotel for three days. Writing conditions.”

And, having handed in this message through the little shutter to the
invisible operator, she threaded her way with the same pensiveness
between the capstans and the ropes up the companion and on to the upper
deck where, having adjusted the rugs around the dozing figure of Mrs.
Van Husum in her deck-chair, she paused, with her grey eyes looking out
across the grey sea, to consider the purplish islands, fringed with
white, the swirls of foam in the greeny and slate-coloured waters,
the white lighthouse, and a spray-beaten tramp-steamer that, rolling,
undulating, and battling through the long swell between them and the
Scillies, was making its good departure for Mexico.

Tall, rounded, in excellent condition, with slow but decided actions,
with that naturally pale complexion and clean-cut run of the cheek-bone
from chin to ear which came to her with her Greek parentage, Katya
Lascarides was reflecting upon the terms of her letter to her sister.

From the tranquillity of her motions and the determination of her few
words, she was to be set down as a person, passionless, practical,
and without tides of emotion. But her eyes, as she leant gazing out
to landwards, changed colour by imperceptible shades, ranging from
grey to the slaty-blue colour of the sea itself, and her brows from
minute to minute, following the course of her thoughts, curved slightly
upwards above eyes that expressed tender reminiscences, and gradually
straightened themselves out until, like a delicate bar below her
forehead, they denoted, stretched and tensile, the fact that she had
arrived at an inflexible determination.

In the small and dusky reading-room, that never contained any readers,
she set herself slowly to write.

 “MY DEAR ELLIDA” (her letter ran),

 “I have again carefully read through your report of what Dr. Tressider
 says of Kitty’s case, and I see no reason why the dear child should
 not find it in her to speak within a few weeks--within a month
 even. Dr. Tressider is certain that there is no functional trouble
 of the brain or the vocal organs. Then there is just the word for
 it--obstinacy. The case is not so very uncommon: the position must be
 regarded psychologically rather than by a pathologist. On the facts
 given me I should say that your little Kitty is indulging in a sort of
 dramatic display. You say that she is of an affectionate, even of a
 jealously affectionate, disposition. Very well, then; I take it that
 she desires to be fussed over. Children are very inscrutable. Who can
 tell, then, whether she has not found out (I do not mean to say that
 she is aware of a motive, as you or I might be)--found out that the
 way to be fussed over is just not to speak. For you, I should say, it
 would be almost impossible to cure her, simply because you are the
 person most worried by her silence. And similarly with the nurses, who
 say to her: ‘Do say so-and-so, there’s a little pet!’ The desire to be
 made a fuss of, to occupy the _whole_ mind of some person or of
 many persons, to cause one’s power to be felt--are these not motives
 very human? Is there any necessity to go to the length of putting them
 down to mental aberration?”

Katya Lascarides had finished her sheet of paper. She blotted it with
deliberate motions, and, leaving it face downwards, she placed her arms
upon the table, and, her eyelashes drooping over her distant eyes, she
looked reflectively at her long and pointed hands. At last she took up
her pen and wrote upon a fresh sheet in her large, firm hand:

“I am diagnosing my own case!”

Serious and unsmiling she looked at the words; then, as if she were
scrawling idly, she wrote:

“Robert.”

Beneath that:

“Robert Hurstlett Grimshaw.”

And then:

“σας ἀγαπω!”

She heaved a sigh of voluptuous pleasure, and began to write, “I love
you! I love you! I love you ...” letting the words be accompanied
by deep breaths of solace, as a very thirsty child may drink. And,
having written the page full all but a tiny corner at the bottom, she
inscribed very swiftly and in minute letters:

“Oh, Robert Grimshaw, why don’t you bring me to my knees?”

She heaved one great sigh of desire, and, leaning back in her chair,
she looked at her words, smiling, and her lips moving. Then, as it
were, she straightened herself out; she took up the paper to tear it
into minute and regular fragments, and, rising, precise and tranquil,
she walked out of the doorway to the rail of the ship. She opened her
hand, and a little flock of white squares whirled, with the swiftness
of swallows, into the discoloured wake. One piece that stuck for a
moment to her forefinger showed the words:

“My own case!”

She turned, appearing engrossed and full of reserve, again to her
writing.

“No,” she commenced, “do not put down this form of obstinacy to
mental aberration. It is rather to be considered as a manifestation
of passion. You say that Kitty is not of a passionate disposition. I
imagine it may prove that she is actually of a disposition passionate
in the extreme. _But all her passion is centred in that one
desire_--the desire to excite concern. The cure for this is not
medical; it is merely practical. Nerve treatment will not cure it, nor
solicitude, but feigned indifference. You will not touch the spot with
dieting; perhaps by ... But there, I will not explain my methods to
you, old Ellida. I discussed Kitty’s case, as you set it forth, very
fully with the chief in Philadelphia, and between us we arrived at
certain conclusions. I won’t tell you what they were, not because I
want to observe a professional reticence, but simply so that, in case
one treatment fails, you may not be in agonies of disappointment and
fear. I haven’t myself much fear of non-success if things are as you
and Dr. Tressider say. After all, weren’t we both of us as kiddies
celebrated for fits of irrational obstinacy? Don’t you remember how
one day you refused to eat if Calton, the cat, was in the dining-room?
And didn’t you keep that up for days and days and days? Yet you were
awfully fond of Calton.... Yes; I think I can change Kitty for you,
but upon one condition--that you never plead for Robert Grimshaw,
that you never mention his name to me. Quite apart from any other
motive of mine--and you know that I consider mother’s example before
anything else in the world--if he will not make this sacrifice for me
he does not love me. I do not mean to say that you are to forbid him
your house, for I understand he dines with you every other day. His
pleadings I am prepared to deal with, but not yours, for in you they
savour of disrespect for mother. Indeed, disrespect or no disrespect,
I will not have it. If you agree to this, come to our hotel as soon
as you have read it. If you disagree--if you won’t, dear, make me a
solemn promise--leave me three days in which to make a choice out of
the five patients who wish to have me in London, and then come and see
me, bringing Kitty.”

“Not a word, you understand--not one single word!”

“On that dreadful day when Robert told us that father had died
intestate and that other--I was going to add ‘horror,’ but, since it
was mother’s doing, she did it, and so it must have been right--when
he told us that we were penniless and illegitimate, I saw in a flash
my duty to mother’s memory. I have stuck to it, and I will stick to
it. Robert must give in, or I will never play the part of wife to him.”

She folded her letter into the stamped envelope, and, having dropped it
deliberately into the ship’s letter-box, she rejoined Mrs. Van Husum,
who was reading “The Mill on the Floss,” on the main deck.




PART III




I


IN the shadow of a huge mulberry-tree, upon whose finger-like branches
already the very light green leaves were beginning to form a veil,
Katya Lascarides was sitting in a deck-chair. The expression upon her
face was one of serenity and of resigned contentment. She was looking
at the farmhouse; she was knitting a silk necktie, a strip of vivid
green that fell across her light grey skirt. With a little quizzical
and jolly expression, her hands thrust deep into the pockets of
cream-coloured overalls, Kitty Langham looked sideways for approval
at her aunt. She had just succeeded in driving a black cat out of the
garden.

They lived down there in a deep silence, Katya never speaking and
eliciting no word from the child. But already the child had made
concessions to the extent of clearing her throat or emitting a little
“Hem!” when she desired to attract her aunt’s attention; but her
constant occupation was found in the obstinate gambols of a pet lamb--a
“sock,” as the farm-people called it--which inhabited the farm-house,
bleated before the door, or was accustomed by butting to send the
garden-gate flying back upon its hinges.

This creature, about one-third the size of a mature ram, was filled
with obstinacies apparently incomprehensible; it was endowed with great
strength and a considerable weight. With one push of its head it would
send the child rolling several feet along the grass; it would upset
chairs in the dining-room; it bleated clamorously for milk at all meals
when Kitty had her milk and water.

Against its obstinacies Kitty’s was valiant but absolutely useless.
With her arms round its neck--a little struggling thing with dark eyes
and black hair, in her little white woollen sweater--she would attempt
to impede the lamb’s progress across a garden-bed. But the clinching
of her white teeth availed nothing at all. She would be dragged across
the moist earth, and left upon her back like a little St. Lawrence
amongst the flames of the yellow crocuses. And at these struggles
Katya Lascarides presided with absolute deafness and with inflexible
indifference; indeed, after their first meeting, when Ellida Langham
had brought the child with her nurse to the gloomy, if tranquil, London
hotel, where Katya had taken from Mrs. Van Husum a parting which lasted
three days, and ended in Mrs. Van Husum’s dissolving into a flood of
tears--at the end of that meeting Ellida had softly reproached Katya
for the little notice she had taken of what was, after all, the nicest
child in London.

But cool, calm, tall, and dressed in a grey that exactly matched her
eyes, Katya “took charge.” And, during the process, whilst she said,
“I shall want this and that,” or “The place must be on a hill; it must
face south-west; it must be seven miles from the sea; it must be a
farm, with plenty of live-stock but no children,” Ellida watched her,
silent, bewildered, and admiring. It seemed so improbable that she
should have a sister so professional, so practical, so determined. Yet
there it was.

And then they descended, Katya and Kitty alone, into the intense
silence of the farm that was found. It was on a hill; it faced
south-west; it was seven miles from the sea, and the farmer’s wife,
because she was childless, surrounded herself with little animals whose
mothers had died.

And there the child played, never hearing a word, in deep silence with
the wordless beasts. This had lasted three weeks.

The gate was behind Katya’s back as she smiled at the rolling hills
below the garden. She smiled because the night before she believed she
had overheard Kitty talking to the lamb; she smiled because she was
exhausted and quivering and lonely. She knitted the green necktie,
her eyes upon the April landscape, where bursts of sunlight travelled
across these veil-like films of new leaves that covered tenderly the
innumerable hedgerows.

And suddenly she leaned forward; the long fingers holding the
knitting-needles ceased all motion. She had heard a footstep--and she
knew every footstep of the farm....

He was leaning over the back of her chair; she saw, against the blue
when she opened her eyes, his clear, dark skin, his clear, dark
contemplative eyes. Her arms slowly raised themselves; her lips
muttered unintelligible words which were broken into by the cool of his
cheek as she drew him down to her. She rose to her feet and recoiled,
and again, with her arms stretched straight before her, as if she were
blind and felt her way, her head thrown back and her eyes closed, an
Oriental with a face of chiselled alabaster. And with her eyes still
closed, her lips against his ear as if she were asleep, she whispered:

“Oh, take me! Take me! Now! For good....”

But these words that came from her without will or control ceased,
and she had none to say of her own volition. There fell upon them the
silent nirvana of passion.

And suddenly, vibrant, shrill, and interrupted by sobs and the grinding
of minute teeth, there rose up in the child’s voice the words:

“Nobody must be loved but me. Nobody must be loved but me.”

They felt minute hands near their knees; they were parted by a little
child, who panted and breathed through her nostrils. They looked at
each other with eyes into which, very slowly, there came comprehension.
And then, over the little thing’s head, Katya repeated:

“Nobody must be loved but me. Nobody must be loved but me.” And with a
quick colour upon her cheeks and the wetness of tears in her eyes, “Oh,
poor child!” she said.

For in the words the child had given to her she recognized the torture
of her own passion.


That night quite late Katya descended the stairs upon tiptoe. She spoke
in a very low voice:

“The little thing’s been talking, talking,” she said, “the quaintest
little thoughts. I’ve seen it coming for days now. Sometimes I’ve seen
her lips moving. She’s the most precise enunciation in the world.”

“I wired Ellida this afternoon,” Robert Grimshaw said.

“Then Ellida will be down here by the last train?” Katya answered, and
he commented: “We’ve only got an hour.”

“But little Kitty,” she was beginning.

“No, no,” he interrupted. “Nobody must be talked about but us. Nobody
must be talked about but us. I’m as glad as you or Ellida or Paul could
possibly be about Kitty, but now that I have got you alone at last
you’re bound to face the music.”

“But little Kitty?” Katya said. She said it, however, only for
form’s sake, for Robert Grimshaw’s gentle face was set in a soft
inflexibility, and his low tones she knew would hold her to the mark.
She had to face the music. In the half-darkness his large eyes perused
her face, dark, mournful and tender. The low, long farmhouse room with
its cheap varnished furniture was softened by the obscure light from
the fire over which he had been standing for a very long hour.

“Is it the same terms, then?” he asked slowly, and she answered:

“Exactly the same.”

He looked down at the fire, resting his hand on the chimney-piece. At
last she said: “We might modify it a little;” and he moved his face, his
eyes searching the obscurity in which she stood, only one of her hands
catching the glow from the fire.

“I cannot modify anything,” he said. “There must be a marriage, by what
recognized rite you like, but--that.”

Her voice remained as level as his, expressing none of the longing, the
wistfulness, that were in her whole being.

“Nobody knew about mother,” she said. “Nobody seems to have got to know
now.”

“And you mean,” he said, “that now you consent to letting nobody know
it about you?”

“You did succeed,” she evaded him, “in concealing it about mother. It
was splendid of you! At the time I thought it wasn’t possible. I don’t
know how you managed it. I suppose nobody knows about it but you and me
and Ellida and Pauline.”

“You mean,” he pursued relentlessly, “you mean that now you consent to
letting nobody know it about you? Of course, besides us, my solicitor
knows--of your mother.”

“At the first shock,” she said, “I thought that the whole world must
know, and so I was determined that the whole world should know that I
hadn’t deserted her memory....” She paused for a wistful moment, whilst
inflexibly he reflected over the coals. “Have you,” she said, “the
slightest inkling of why she did it?”

He shook his head slowly; he sighed.

“Of course I couldn’t take you even on those terms--that nobody knew,”
he said, with his eyes still averted. Then he turned upon her, swarthy,
his face illumined with a red glow. The slow mournfulness of their
speeches, the warmth, the shadow, kept him silent for a long time.
“No,” he said at last, “there isn’t a trace of a fact to be found. I’m
as much in the dark as I was on that day when we parted. I’m not as
stunned, but I’m just as mystified.”

“Ah!” she said, “but what did you feel--then?”

“Did you ever realize,” he asked, “how the shock came to me? You
remember old Partington, with the grey beard? He asked me to call on
them. He sat on the opposite side of his table. He handed me the copy
of some notes your father had made for their instructions as to his
will. It was quite short. It ran: ‘You are to consider that my wife
and I were never married. I desire you to frame a will so phrased
that my entire estate, real and personal, should devolve upon my two
daughters, Ellida and Katharine, without revealing the fact that they
are illegitimate. This should not be difficult, since their mother’s
name, which they are legally entitled to bear, was the same as my own,
she having been my cousin.’” Grimshaw broke off his low monologue to
gaze again at her, when he once more returned his eyes to the coals.
“You understand,” he said, “what that meant to me. It was handed to me
without a word; and after a long time Partington said: f You understand
that you are your uncle’s heir-at-law--nothing more.”

Katya whispered: “Poor old Toto!”

“You know how I honoured your father and mother,” he said. “They were
all the parents I ever knew. Well, you know all about that.... And then
I had to break the news to you.... Good God!”

He drew his hands down his face.

“Poor old Toto!” Katya said slowly again. “I remember.”

“And you won’t make any amends?” he asked.

“I’ll give you myself,” she said softly.

He answered: “No! no!” and then, wearily, “It’s no good.”

“Well, I did speak like a beast to you,” she said. “But think what a
shock it was to me--mother not dead a month, and father not four days,
and so suddenly--all that. I’ll tell you how I felt. I felt a loathing
for all men. I felt a recoiling from you--a recoiling, a shudder.”

“Oh, I know,” he said, and suddenly he began to plead: “Haven’t you
injured me enough? Haven’t I suffered enough? And why?--why? For a mad
whim. Isn’t it a mad whim? Or what? I can understand you felt a recoil.
But ...”

“Oh, I don’t feel it now,” she said; “you know.”

“Ah yes,” he answered; “but I didn’t know till to-day, till just now
when you raised your arms. And all these years you haven’t let me know.”

“How did you know?” she asked. “How did you know that I felt it? But,
of course, you understand me even when I don’t speak.”

“It’s heaven,” he said, “to know that you’ve grown out of it. It has
been hell to bear the thought....”

“Oh, my dear! ...” she said.

“Such loneliness,” he said. “Do you know,” he continued suddenly,
“I came back from Athens? I’m supposed to be a strong-minded man--I
suppose I am a strong-minded man--but I turned back the moment I
reached Greece because I couldn’t bear--I could not bear the thought
that you might still shudder at my touch. Now I know you don’t, and ...”

“Ellida will be here soon,” Katya said. “Can’t you hear her train
coming down the valley ... there...? And I want to tell you what
I’ve found out about mother. I’ve found it out, I’ve made it out,
remembering what she said from day to day. I’ll tell you what it
was--it was trustfulness. I remember it now. It was the mainspring of
her life. I think I know how the very idea came into her mind. I’ve got
it down to little details. I’ve been inquiring even about the Orthodox
priests there were in England at the time. There wasn’t a single one!
One had just died suddenly, and there did not come a successor for six
months. And mother was there. And when she was a young thing, mother, I
know, had a supreme contempt--a bitter contempt--for all English ideas.
She got over it. When we children were born she became the gentlest
being. You know, that was what she always was to me--she was a being,
not a woman. When she came into the room she spread soothing around
her. I might be in paroxysms of temper, but it died out when she opened
the door. It’s so strong upon me that I hardly remember what she looked
like. I can’t remember her any more than I can conceive of the looks of
a saint. A saint!--well, she was that. She had been hot-tempered, she
had been contemptuous. She became what you remember after we were born.
You may say she got religion.”

Katya, her eyes full of light, paused; she began again with less of
exultation.

“I dare say,” she said, “she began to live with father without the
rites of the Church because there was no Church she acknowledged to
administer them; but later, she didn’t want them remember how she
always told us, ‘Trust each other, trust each other; then you will
become perfectly to be trusted.’ And again, she would never let us make
promises one to another. Don’t you remember? She always said to us:
‘Say that you will do a thing. Never promise--never. Your word must be
your bond.’ You remember?”

Grimshaw slowly nodded his head. “I remember.”

“So that I am certain,” she said, “that that was why she never married
father. I think she regarded marriage--the formality, the vows--as a
desecration. Don’t you see, she wanted to be my father’s chattel, and
to trust him absolutely--to trust, to trust! Isn’t that the perfect
relationship?”

Grimshaw said: “Yes, I dare say that is the explanation. But ...”

“But it makes no difference to you?” she pleaded. In the distance she
heard the faint grind of wheels.

“No,” he said, “not even if no one else knew it. I’m very tired; I’m
very lonely. I want you so; I want you with all my heart. But not
that--not that.”

“Not ever?” she said.

“No,” he answered; “I’ll play with my cards on the table. If I grow
very tired--very, very tired--if I cannot hold out any longer, well,
I may consent--to your living with me as your mother lived with your
father. But”--and he stood up briskly--“I’ll tell you this: you’ve
strengthened me--you’ve strengthened me in my motive. If you had
shuddered at me as you did on that day years ago, I think I should have
given in by now. But you didn’t any longer. You’ve come to me; you
raised your arms to me. Don’t you see how it has strengthened me? I’m
not alone any more; I’m not the motherless boy that I was.... Yes, it’s
heaven.”

Her hands fell by her side. The sound of wheels filled the room, and
ceased.

“If I’d repulsed you, you’d have given in?” she said.

The door fell violently back, and from the black and radiant figure of
Ellida came the triumphant cry: “Kitty’s spoken! Kitty’s spoken! You’ve
not deceived me!”




II


HE found Pauline Leicester in his dining-room upon his return to town.
Little and serious, and always with the tiny smile about her lips, she
was seated in his deep chair by the fireplace. He was happy and erect,
with Katya’s kisses still upon his lips, and for all the world he felt
a tenderness.

“I got your letter,” she said. “Miss Lascarides has come back; the
child has spoken. I suppose you are very happy?”

He feared to detect jealousy in her tones; he found only a
business-like precision.

“I was coming to dine with you,” he said. “Can’t you do with me?”

“Oh, we want you so much!” she said.

He had a sudden and black premonition.

“You’re not on bad terms with Dudley?” he asked.

“Tell me,” she said, “you were in town part of the time when Dudley was
all alone? Mother died, you know, a week after you left for Athens.”

“Oh, poor child!” Grimshaw answered.

Her lips moved a little.

“She suffered so much, poor dear; she was so brave.” She looked up at
him with a queer little smile. “I suppose were born to suffer. It’s up
to us to be brave.”

“Oh, but Dudley hasn’t been giving you trouble?” he asked. “You aren’t
on bad terms with him?”

“One could not be on bad terms with Dudley,” she answered. “But he’s
giving me trouble.”

“The hound!” Grimshaw answered.

“Oh, it isn’t what he does, it’s what he is,” she said quickly. She
rose and put her little hand upon his arm. “Tell me, Robert,” she said,
“what has happened to him He’s very ill.”

Grimshaw made a step back.

“Not tuberculosis, really?” he asked.

“I am sure he’s very ill,” she said, “mentally; he’s quite altered.
What’s to be done?”

“My poor girl,” Grimshaw voiced his tenderness and concern.

“Tell me,” she adjured him, “what happened to him? It’s something
that’s happened. He couldn’t do anything. Tell me the truth!”

“How should I know?” he asked. “How should I know?”

“Sometimes he’s quite the same; sometimes he’s gay--he’s too gay. And
then ...” She looked up. “He sits and thinks; he’ll sit silent for
hours. He’s not spoken a word all the morning. And then suddenly ...
he’ll shudder. And his eyes aren’t the same; they aren’t the same, you
understand. It’s as if he were afraid. Afraid! He cowers into a corner.
What is it, Robert? You know.”

Grimshaw was silent, pondering.

“Tell me!” she said. “You _shall_ tell me; you know. Is it
religious mania?”

Grimshaw shook his head.

“No, I don’t think it can be religious mania.” He added: “It might be
hypochondria--sheer anxiety about his health. He was always like that.”

“No,” she said, “he hasn’t been near a doctor. It can’t be that.” She
looked up at him with a little, birdlike gaze. “I know what it is,” she
said, “it’s another woman.”

Robert Grimshaw threw up his hands that were still gloved.

“You aren’t surprised,” she said, and there was about her whole figure
an air of a little and tender calmness. “It’s no good your feigning
surprise. I am sure you know all about it. Oh, I know what men are, and
women. I have been a nursery governess, you know. Isn’t it true that
there was another woman?” and, at his hesitation, she pleaded: “Tell me
the truth, there was!”

“Well, there was,” he said.

“And it was Etta Stackpole,” she accused him.

He saw her sit, looking down at the point of her umbrella.

“I’ve got to get him well,” she said. “Tell me the truth.”

“Yes, it was Lady Hudson,” he answered. “But you aren’t going to ...”

“Robert dear,” she said, with her little, clear, appealing voice.
“You can’t make such a mistake as to think that I am going to hamper
Dudley. It’s my task in life to keep him going. Think it out. I’m not
_really_ the girl to give ourselves away. I turned Dudley out of
my mother’s house. I ought not to have done it, but mother could not
bear him. Perhaps I valued mother more than Dudley--perhaps that was
wrong. But I’ve heard you say: ‘Do what you want and take what you get
for it.’ I’m taking what I get for it, and it’s easier to do it because
I know what men are.”

“It wasn’t Dudley’s doing,” Grimshaw said. “We can’t even tell...”

“Robert, dear,” she repeated, “I _have_ been a nursery-governess,
you know.”

“Oh yes,” he answered, “but you’re a woman too.”

“Oh yes,” she imitated him, “but I’m a woman of our class. Don’t you
see the two things I’ve learned? One is, that we can’t have what we
want. I may have wanted ... Well, that does not matter. But if I
couldn’t give, I could get--adoration. That’s all there is to it.”

Robert Grimshaw said suddenly: “Yes, you could make something out of
poor Dudley.”

“I won’t say that it doesn’t hurt,” she took him up: “it does. Or,
no, it doesn’t. Well, one can’t say.... Up in the nursery at the
Brigstocks’ there were great big clumsy boys. They adored me, and it
was my business to make men of them--at any rate, during the holidays.
Well, they’d disobey me. Sometimes they’d even deceive me--rather
meanly, in little things; and then they’d behave like Dudley. So that
I’m used to it on a small scale. It’s saddening that a man can’t be
quite true, even when he adores you; but he can’t. That’s all.”

She was buttoning up her little black gloves, and she stood up to go.

“Wouldn’t you like me,” Grimshaw asked, “to break it to him that you
know? I suppose he’s got to know it?”

“Of course he’s got to know it,” she said. “He’ll never be himself
as long as he’s trying to conceal it. But ... I think I’ll tell him
myself. You see, he might not like you to know; it might make him shy.
It’s best to drink one’s own black draughts.” But when she reached
the door she turned to say: “You might come along soon--quite soon. I
shan’t say more than three words to him. Your coming in might relieve
any strain. It would carry us over till bedtime.”

“I’ll be there well before lunch,” he said. “It’s twelve now.”

As they stood on the doorstep, he taking his farewell, she brought
out: “Mind, nobody’s to blame but me, from the beginning. If it hadn’t
been for mother, I don’t suppose I should have married Dudley. I knew
I could make a good wife for him; I know I can make a man of him, and
I know he adores me. But that isn’t everything. I can put him into the
sort of position he ought to occupy. But that’s only being a nursery
governess on a larger scale. It’s a good piece of work.... But--but
for mother ... oh, poor dear!”--she broke off, and the blue eyes that
gazed down the empty street were filmed over for a moment--“much it has
profited mother to have me off her hands. It’s five months now, and
she’s been dead thirteen days. Well, so long.”

She waved her hand minutely to him from the pavement, and exclaimed:
“Go in; you’ll take cold!” and then she seemed to be blown round the
corner into Curzon Street.




III


IN passing from the dining-room to his snuggery at the back of the
house, Dudley Leicester brushed against his tall hat. He took it from
the rack, and surveyed distastefully its ruffled surface.

“Saunders,” he called, “take this round to Tang’s. They’re to put a
band on it a half-inch deeper, and to iron it. I hate a hat that’s been
ruffled.”

“It _does_ mark a man off, sir,” Saunders said from the
dining-room door.

Saunders had been considering with his master the question of dark
shades in trousering, and the colloquial atmosphere seemed to remain in
the air.

“Now, what the devil do you mean by that?” Leicester asked. “Do you
mean it would help you to track him?”

“It helps you to place him, sir,” Saunders answered. He brushed the hat
with his sleeve, and surveyed it inscrutably. “If a gentleman doesn’t
know that his hat’s ruffled, it means that he’s something on his mind.
I mean, sir, it means that he belongs to the professional or merchant
class, or below that. It’s only gentlemen of leisure who can think of
their hats at all times.”

Dudley Leicester laughed.

“What an odd fish you are, Saunders,” he said. “Get along, man, with
the hat at once. I’m going to Mrs. Langham’s with your mistress just
after lunch.”

He lounged towards his snuggery, smiling to himself at the thought that
Katya Lascarides had again refused Robert Grimshaw, though he and she,
and Ellida and the child had been staying a week or more at Brighton
together.

“A funny job--what?” he said. He had developed the habit of talking
to himself whilst Pauline had been away. He looked at himself in the
rather smoky mirror that was over the black marble mantel of a gloomy
room. “What the deuce is it all about? She loves him like nuts; he’s
like a bee after honey. Why don’t they marry?”

Looking at himself in the mirror, he pulled down one of his eyelids to
see if he were not a little anæmic, for he had heard the day before
that if a man were at all anæmic, the inner flesh of the eyelid was
pale. A careful survey showed him that his eyelid was very red, and his
eyes watering. He muttered: “Cobwebs! That’s what it is! Cobwebs in the
brain....” He dropped himself into a deep, dark saddle-bag chair. In
twenty minutes it would be time for him to take his exercise. “Umph!
cobwebs!” he said. “Yes, I’ve had some of my own, but _I’ve_
broken through them. Poor old Robert! He hasn’t, though.”

He suddenly realized that he was talking aloud, and then the
telephone-bell rang at his elbow. He gave a grunt, swore, and switched
off the connection, so that it would ring in the butler’s pantry. And
when he had got over the slight shock to his nerves, he sat for some
time in silence. Suddenly he exclaimed: “What rot it was!”

He was thinking of what he called his cobwebs. It had all been a
trifle, except that Etta was a devil. He would like to flay her hide
with a whip. But he realized that it was impossible that Pauline should
have heard of it. At least, it was unlikely. If she had been going to
hear of it, she would have heard by now.

He stretched his arms behind his head, and rested his crown upon his
hands.

“Never felt so fit in my life,” he said, “never.”

Saunders--if Saunders knew--he wouldn’t go and blab to Pauline. What
good would it do him? Besides, Saunders was a decent sort; besides,
too, the fellow who had recognized his voice, probably he was a decent
sort, too. After all, blackmailers were not in his line. He doubted if
he had ever spoken to a real bad hat in his life for long enough to
let him recognize his voice.... And perhaps the whole thing had been a
trick of his nerves. He had certainly been nervy enough at the time.

“All cobwebs,” he said, “beastly cobwebs!”

Then all the dreadful fears that he had felt ... they were all nothing!
It would have broken Pauline’s heart.

“She’s had such rough times, little woman,” he said, “such beastly
rough times.”

But though his cobwebs had been imbecile enough, the remembrance of the
pain made him wince.

“By Jove! I was nearly mad,” he said.

He had felt insane desires to ask strangers--perfect strangers in the
street--whether they were the men who had rung up 4,259 Mayfair.

“By Jove!” he repeated again, “by Jove! And now it’s all over.”

He leaned back luxuriously in his chair; he stretched his long legs.

“Never so fit in my life,” he said; and he extended his long hand to
take from the desk at his side a little carved box that Pauline had
bought of a Japanese to hold his nail-scissors.

He had observed a little speck of dirt beneath the nail of his
forefinger. And in the pleasant well-being of the world he half dozed
away, the box held nearly to his nose. It exhaled a faint musky odour,
and suddenly his eyes opened as he jerked out of his day-dream.

“Etta!” he said, for the box exhaled the scent that Etta Hudson always
had about her--a sweet, musky, cobwebby odour....

“By God!” he said; and he crossed himself as he had learned to do in
St. Andrew’s, Holborn, where his wife worshipped.

The lines of his face seemed to decompose; his head fell forward; his
mouth opened. Pauline was closing the door after her silent entry. It
was a long, dusky slice of the rear-house, and he watched her approach,
wide-eyed and panic-stricken, as if she held an animal-trainer’s whip.
The little smile was about her lips when she stood over his huddled
figure in the light of the stained-glass window that had been put in to
hide the dreary vision of house-backs.

She held out her little gloved hand; her face was quite tranquil.

“She knows all about it,” he said, “Good God!”

“Dudley, dear,” she said, “I know all about it.”




IV


ROBERT GRIMSHAW was pushing the electric button beside the Leicesters’
entry when, hatless, the daylight falling on his ruffled hair, Dudley
Leicester flung open the door and ran down the street.

“Oh, go after him; go after him!” Pauline cried from the hall.

If Dudley Leicester had done anything at all in his life it was to run
at school. Thus it was a full minute before Grimshaw came to the door
of the little dark hat-ironing shop, in the middle of which Leicester
stood, leaning over the counter, holding by the waistcoat a small man
with panic-stricken blue eyes. Afterwards he heard that Leicester had
asked where his man Saunders was. But for the moment he had ceased to
shake the little hatter. And then, suddenly, he asked:

“Are you the chap who rang up 4,259 Mayfair?”

“Sir! sir!” the little man cried out. Dudley Leicester shook him and
shook him: a white band-box fell from the counter and rolled almost
into the street.

“Are you? Are you?” Dudley Leicester cried out incessantly.

And when the little man screamed: “No! no!” Leicester seized the heavy
rounded smoothing-iron and raised it to the height of his arm so that
it struck the brown, smoked ceiling. The little man ducked beneath the
counter, his agonized eyes gazing upwards.

But at Grimshaw’s cool, firm grasp upon his wrists, Leicester sank
together. He passed his hand so tightly down his face that the colour
left it, to return in a swift flush.

“I’ve got cobwebs all over my face,” he muttered, “beastly, beastly
cobwebs.”

He did not utter another word. Grimshaw, taking him firmly by the arm
above the elbow led him back to his house, of which the white door
still stood open.

The dark door of the snuggery at the end of the long passage closed
upon Leicester and Pauline, as if upon a deep secret. In the hall,
Robert Grimshaw remained standing, looking straight before him. It was,
perhaps, the first time that he had ever meditated without looking at
Peter, and the dog’s large and luminous eyes fixed upon his face were
full of uneasiness. Robert Grimshaw had always looked mature. In the
dreary illumination from the fanlight above the hall-door he seemed
positively old. The healthy olive colour of his clear, pale complexion
seemed to have disappeared in a deadly whiteness. And whilst he stood
and thought, and whilst, having gone into the dining-room, he sat deep
in a chair with Peter before him, the expression of his face deepened
gradually. At each successive progress of his mind from point to point,
his mouth, which was usually pursed as if he were pleasantly about to
whistle--his mouth elongated itself minutely, until at last the lips
turned downwards. He had been leaning back in his chair. He leaned
suddenly forward as if with fear and irresolution. His eyes saw nothing
when they rested upon the little brown dog that turned its quivering
muzzle up to his face.

He rose and stood irresolutely. He went setting down his feet very
gently on the marble squares of the hall. It was as if he crept to the
door of the room that held mystery. He could hear the voices of the
servants and a faint clicking of silver being laid upon a tray. But
from the room ... nothing!

He stood listening for a long time, then gently he turned the handle
and entered, standing near the door. Pauline Leicester was leaning
over her husband, who was sunk deep into his chair. He had an odd, a
grotesque aspect, of being no more than so many clothes carelessly
thrown down. She looked for a moment round at Robert Grimshaw, and then
again bent her tender face over her husband.

“Dudley, dear,” she said; “don’t you hear? It’s nothing. It’s all
nothing. Listen!” She raised her voice to repeat: “It is all nothing. I
have nothing against you.”

She remained seated on the arm of the chair, looking at him intently,
mournfully, almost as Peter looked at his master, and the little dog
paddling through the room stood up on its hind-legs to touch her hand
with the tip of its tongue. She began to speak again, uttering the
same words, repeating and repeating them, hoping that some at least
would reach his brain. He sat entirely still, hunched together, his
eyes looking as if they were veiled and long dead. Pauline had ceased
speaking again, when suddenly he passed his hand down his face from
brow to chin, and then, as if the sudden motion gave her the idea that
his brain might again have become alert, she repeated:

“Listen, Dudley dear....”

Her voice, clear and minute, continuing in a low monotone, had the
little flutings and little catches that so exactly and so exquisitely
fitted the small quaintnesses of expression. And to Robert Grimshaw she
appeared to look downwards upon Dudley, not as if she were expecting
him to answer, but with a tender expression of a mother looking at a
child many months before it can talk.

And suddenly she let herself down from the arm of the chair and glided
over to where, in the gloom, Robert Grimshaw was standing beside the
door. The little brown dog flapped after her over the floor.

“You had better go and get a doctor,” she said.

He answered hesitatingly: “Isn’t it a little early?” He added: “Isn’t
it a little early to take it that he’s definitely ill?”

“Oh, I’ve known that he’s been definitely ill for a long time,” she
answered. “I ought to have called in a doctor before, but I wanted to
consult you, so I waited. It was wrong. As it turns out, it was wrong,
too, my not letting you speak to Dudley instead of me. You think it
would hurt my feelings to hear a doctor say that he is actually mad.
But I’ve been through with it already. I know it. The only thing now is
treatment, and the sooner it begins the better.”

Grimshaw’s face set sharply in its painful lines.

“Don’t say that he’s mad,” he said, in the most commanding accent she
had ever heard him use.

“Just look at him,” she answered.

Dudley Leicester, with the air of a dissipated scarecrow ruined by
gambling, was gazing straight in front of him, sunk deep in his chair,
his eyes gazing upon nothing, his hands beating a tattoo upon the
leather arms.

“I won’t have you say it,” Robert Grimshaw said fiercely.

“Well, the responsibility’s mine,” she answered, and her tiny lips
quivered. “There’s my mother dead and Dudley mad, and I’m responsible.”

“No, I’m responsible,” Grimshaw said in a fierce whisper.

“Now come,” she answered; “if I hadn’t married Dudley, mother would
never have had her pony-chaise or got pneumonia ...”

“It was I that brought you together,” Grimshaw said.

“Oh! if you put it that way,” she answered; “there’s no end to who’s
responsible. You may say it was the Brigstocks. But the immediate
responsibility is mine. I ought to have called in a doctor sooner. I
ought not to have given him this shock. Don’t think I’m going to be
morbid about it, but that sums it up, and the only question is how the
thing is to be put straight. For that we want advice, and soon. The
only question is who’s to give it?”

“But what are the facts?” Robert Grimshaw asked.

“Oh! you know the facts,” she answered.

“I want a few details,” he responded, “to give to the man I go to. When
did it begin? Have you seen any signs of fever? Has he been off his
feed, and so on?”

Pauline opened the door gently. She looked over her shoulder to see
if Leicester had stirred. She held the door just ajar when she and
Grimshaw were outside.

“I used to think,” she said, “even when we were engaged, that there
was something a little strange about Dudley. It wasn’t an unpleasant
strangeness. No, it was an attraction. He used to be absent in his
manner at times. It was that gave me the idea that there might be
something in him. It gave an idea that he really had a brain that
stuck to something. Of course, when I twitted him with it, when I got
really to know him, I discovered--but that was only after we were
married--that he was only thinking about his health. But since we’ve
been married he’s beep quite different. I don’t believe you really know
Dudley. He is very quiet, but he does observe things, and he’s got a
little humour of his own. I don’t suppose anyone else has ever noticed
it, but it is there. His fits of strangeness before we were married
were very much like this. Not so wild, but still like this in kind.”

She opened the door and peeped in. Dudley Leicester was sitting where
he had been.

“As to fever--no, I haven’t noticed that he’s had any fever. He’s eaten
very well, except when these fits of gloom were on him; then it was
almost impossible to get him to the table. I don’t know when I noticed
it first. He came down for mother’s funeral, and it seemed to me to be
natural that he should be depressed. But in between these fits he’s
been so nice, so nice!”

“I’ll ‘phone to Sir William Wells,” Grimshaw said; “I’ll ‘phone at
once.”

“Oh, don’t ‘phone. Go!” she answered.

He hesitated markedly:

“Well, then, have Saunders with you in the room,” he said, “or just
outside the door.”

She looked up at him for a moment, her blue eyes wide.

“Oh, _that_!” she said. “You don’t need to have the least fear for
me. Don’t you understand--if he is mad, what it is that has driven him
mad?”

He looked down upon her with a deep tenderness.

“I suppose it’s the shock,” he said.

“Oh no,” she answered. “It isn’t that; it’s his feeling for me. Haven’t
you heard him say a hundred times: ‘Poor little woman! she’s had such
a beastly time!’ Don’t you understand? The quality of his love for me
was his desire to protect me. It’s funny, isn’t it?--funny enough to
make you cry. He thought I’d had such a bad time that it was up to
him to keep every kind of trouble from me. He’s done something--with
Etta Hudson. Well, and ever since he’s been dreading that it should
get to my ears--and me in mourning for dear mother, and he alone and
dreading--oh, _dreading_. And not a soul to speak to....”

Again she looked up into Grimshaw’s eyes--and he was filled with an
intolerable pity. She smiled, quaintly and bravely.

“You see,” she said, “he was not afraid of what I should do but of what
I should feel. I woke up and found him crying one night. Funny, isn’t
it? that anyone should cry--about me. But I suppose he was feeling all
that he thought _I_ should feel. He was identifying himself with
me. And now he’s like that, and I don’t feel anything more about it.
But,” she added, “that ought to satisfy you that I’m quite safe.”

“Ah,” he said, “but so often--these strong passions take exactly the
opposite turn. Do have Saunders handy.”

“Robert, dear,” she said, “if he’s mad enough for that, I should not
mind his killing me. I should be glad.”

“Oh, dear child,” he answered, “would that be the way to help you to
make a man of him?”

She reflected for a moment.

“Robert,” she said, “how right you always are! I seem to be so wise
to myself until you prove how wrong I always am. I thought it the
right way for me to speak to Dudley. If I only _had_.... And oh,
Robert,” she said, “how good you are to us! How could we get on without
you?”

He said suddenly, as if it were a military command:

“Don’t say that. I forbid it!” He added more softly: “I’ll go to Sir
William Wells at once. Katya says he’s the best man of the kind in
London.”

“She ought to know,” she said. “Yes; go quickly. I’ve kept you talking
only so as to let you know all there is to know. It’s difficult for a
wife to talk about these things to a doctor. He might not believe it
if I said that Dudley was so fond of me. But _you_ know, and you
may make him believe it. For it all turns on that.... But I will have
Saunders within call till you come back with him....”

She went into the room, and, having touched the bell, stood looking
down upon her husband with a contemplation of an infinite compassion.
In the light of the stained glass at the end of a long passage of
gloom she brought tears into Grimshaw’s eyes, and an infinite passion
and tenderness into his whole being. His throat felt loosened, and
he gasped. It was a passion for which there was neither outlet nor
expression. He was filled with a desire for action without having any
guidance as to what it was that he desired to do.

And the discreet Saunders, coming up the servants’ steps to answer the
bell, saw his master’s friend strike himself suddenly on the high white
forehead a hard blow with his still gloved hand.

“Ah! I thought it would come to that,” he said to himself.




V


“WELL, you aren’t looking very chirpy,” Etta Stackpole said.

“I’m not feeling it,” Robert Grimshaw answered.

He was leaning over the rails in the Row, and Etta Stackpole sat on a
huge chestnut that, its body motionless as a statue, its legs planted
wide apart, threw its arched neck from time to time into the air, and
dispersed great white flakes of foam.

“Time goes on, too,” he continued. “It goes on, and it’s only you that
it passes by.”

“Thanks,” she said, and she touched her hat with her crop.

With the clitter of stirrups and the creak of leather and the
indistinguishable thud of hoofs, the riders went by behind her in twos
and threes. Behind his back was the perpetual crushing of feet and
whisper of innumerable conversations, conducted in discreet undertones.
It was a place of a myriad rustlings and small, pleasant sounds; and
along the great length of the Row, vanishing into the distance, the
young green of the leaves swayed in the April breezes. A huge cloud
toppled motionless above the barracks, pink against the blue sky and
dull in its softened shadows.

Robert Grimshaw had walked along nearer the rails than was his habit
until he came to where Etta Stackpole--it was just as much her habit,
so that he had known where to find her--was talking to three men in
her brilliant way. And raising his head, Robert Grimshaw had inserted
himself between Hugo van Voss, a Dutch Jew beginning to show adiposity,
and Charles McDiarmid, who, with his grey peaked beard and slight lisp,
was asking why she hadn’t come to the Caledonian Market last Tuesday to
look for bargains in the bric-à-brac that is displayed there upon the
broad flagstones.

“Oh, I’m not a bit gone on bric-à-brac really,” she said, “and it’s the
most tiring thing in the world.”

“Well, Hugo there,” McDiarmid lisped slightly, in his gentle and
sibilant tones, “got a Chinese tapestry in scarlet silk as big as the
side of the Ritz, with realistic dragons and mandolines embroidered on
it in sky-blue and purple. He got it for thirteen and sixpence, and
he’s going to make dressing-gowns out of it.”

Van Voss protested inaudibly.

“Oh, you are, you know you are,” McDiarmid asserted gaily, “and we’re
going to carry you in triumph down the Mall. Get Van Voss to give you
one, Lady Hudson, and get Grimshaw here to drive you down to Bushey on
a coach labelled ‘Queen of Sheba.’”

“He doesn’t take me anywhere any more,” Etta Hudson said.

And Grimshaw answered desultorily:

“Only give me a chance.”

Etta Hudson sustained, with a brilliant indifference, the glances from
the half-closed eyes of McDiarmid and those of the dark, large, rather
insolent and inscrutable orbs of the stockbroker.

“Oh yes,” she said to Grimshaw. “You take me down to Bushey again. I’m
booked up three deep for the next six months, but I’ll chuck anybody
you like except my dressmaker.”

“Booked up?” Robert Grimshaw leant over the rails to say. “Yes, we’re
all booked up. We’re an idle, useless crowd, and we never have an
instant to do anything that we like.”

McDiarmid, reaching over a long claw, caught hold of the shiny
financier, and, hauling him off up the Row, seemed to involve him in a
haze of monetary transactions. He was, indeed, supposed at that moment
to be selling Van Voss a castle on the Borders, where the King had
stayed.

“Well, we used to be chummy enough in the old days,” Etta Hudson said.
“Yes, you take me down to Bushey again. Don’t you remember the time we
went, and Dudley stopped at home because he thought he was sickening
for the measles?”

It was then, after their eyes had encountered for a long minute, that
Etta Hudson had said that Robert Grimshaw wasn’t looking very chirpy.
Except for the moments when their eyes did meet--the moments when each
wondered what the deuce the other was up to--Etta Hudson flung out her
words with an admirable naturalness:

“Oh, take a pill, and don’t talk about the passing years,” she said.
“It’s the spring that’s crocking you up. Horses are just like that.
Why, even Orlando here stumbles at the fall of the leaf and about
Chestnut Sunday. Yes, you take me down to Bushey. You know you’ll
find me as good as a tonic. I should say you’re having an overdose
of too-brainy society. Doesn’t Dudley’s wife go in for charity
organization or politics? She’s a sort of a little wax saint, isn’t
she, got up to look like a Gaiety girl? I know the sort. Yes, you tell
me about Dudley Leicester’s wife. I’d like to know. That’s a bargain.
You take me down to Bushey and talk about Dudley Leicester’s wife all
the way down, and then you can talk about me all the way up, and we’re
quits.”

Robert Grimshaw raised his eyes till, dark and horseshoe-like, they
indicated, as it were, a threat--as it were, a challenge.

“If you put it up to me to that extent,” he said, “I’ll bet you a new
riding-habit that you look as if you could do with, that you won’t come
down and lunch in Bushey to-day.”

“What’s the matter with my habit?” she said. “I’ve had it six years.
If it’s been good enough for all that time, it’s good enough for now.
Give me time to say a word to old Lady Collimore. My husband wants me
to keep in with her, and she’s got a new astrologer living with her as
a P. G. I won’t be five minutes after I’ve spoken to her, and then I’m
your man.”

“You’ll come in these things?” Grimshaw said.

“Oh, that’s all right,” she answered. “It’s just popping into a
taxi-cab and getting out at the Park gates and walking across the
Park, and having lunch at one of those little ‘pub’ places, and then
I suppose you’ll let the taxi drop me at the door. You won’t turn me
adrift at the Marble Arch, or send me home by tram?”

“Well, you are like a man,” Robert Grimshaw said. “You look like a man,
and you talk like a man....”

She tapped her horse with her crop.

“Oh, I’m all right,” she said. “But I wish--I wish to hell I had been
one,” she called over her shoulder, whilst slowly she walked her horse
along by the railings, searching with her eyes for the venerable figure
and tousled grey hair emerging centaur-like from its bath-chair--the
figure of the noted Lady Collimore, who had mysterious gifts, who had
been known to make top-hats perform the feat of levitation, and whose
barrack-like house at Queen’s Gate had an air of being filled with
astrologers, palmists, and faith-healers.


And the first thing that, bowler-hatted and in her tight habit, Etta
Hudson said to Grimshaw in the taxi-cab was:

“Now tell me the truth. Is everything that I’m going to say likely to
be used as evidence against me?”

“Oh, come, come!” Robert Grimshaw said.

They were whirled past the tall houses and the flitting rails. They
jerked along at a terrific rate down through Kensington until, falling
into a stream of motor-propelled vehicles near the Albert Hall, their
speed was reduced to a reasonable jog-trot.

“Then you only want to know things,” Etta Stackpole said. “You see, one
never can tell in these days what who’s up to. There’s no reason why
you shouldn’t have fixed it up with Leicester’s wife. She can divorce
him and have you.”

“Oh, it’s nothing of that sort,” Grimshaw said.

She looked him up and down with her eyes, curious and scrutinizing.

“I should have thought,” she said, “that she would have preferred you
to Dudley. I’m only telling you this that you mayn’t think me mad,
suspecting the other thing, but I see you from my window going into
Dudley’s house, with your dog behind you. And I should have said that
that child preferred you to Dudley, or would jolly well find out her
mistake after she’d married him.”

“Oh, it’s nothing of that sort,” Grimshaw reiterated.

“I’ll take your word for it,” she answered. “So I expect it’s only
curiosity that brought you here. Why do you always want to know such
a jolly lot about people? It must give you a lot of trouble, and you
don’t make anything out of it.”

“My dear child,” Robert Grimshaw said, “why do you always...?” He
hesitated and she put in mockingly:

“Go in for cutting-out expeditions. That is what was on the tip of your
tongue, wasn’t it, Robert? I’ve heard you say that of me from half a
dozen sources. Well, I’ll tell you. I do what I do because I want to.
It’s a hobby.”

“And I do what I do because I want to,” Robert Grimshaw mocked her.
“It’s my hobby. We’re Eve and the serpent. You want the apple and I
want--I’ve got the knowledge.”

“You have, have you?” she said. And when Grimshaw answered in the
affirmative, she uttered a long and reflective, “Ah!” And then suddenly
she said, “But this isn’t in the contract. You ought to talk about
Dudley’s wife all the way down to Bushey. Tell me about her!”

They were whirling through the dirty and discoloured streets of
Hammersmith, while pieces of waste-paper flew up into the air in the
wind of their passage. It was a progress of sudden jerks, long, swift
rushes, and of sudden dodgings aside.

“Ah, Pauline Leicester!” Grimshaw said; “you haven’t got to fear her
on one side, but you have on another. She’s a quaint, dear, cool,
determined little person. I shouldn’t advise you to do Dudley Leicester
any more harm because, though she’s not in the least bit revengeful,
she won’t let you play any more monkey-tricks to damage poor Dudley.
Don’t you make the mistake of thinking she’s only a little wax doll.
She’s much more dangerous than you could ever be, because she doesn’t
spread herself so much abroad. You’ve damaged poor Dudley quite enough.”

A sudden light came into her fierce eyes.

“You don’t mean to say ...” she said.

“Oh, I don’t mean to say,” he answered, “Dudley’s perishing of passion
for you, and I don’t mean to say that you’ve spread dissension between
Dudley and Pauline. It’s worse than that ...”

“What is it; what the deuce is it?” she interrupted him.

“Ah,” he said, “that’s not in the contract! You shall hear as soon
as we’re in Bushey Park, not before. We’re going to talk of Pauline
Leicester all the way down.”

“I hear Katya Lascarides has come back,” she said. “Well, then, about
your Pauline.”

“Well,” Grimshaw said, “I’ve said you haven’t got to fear Pauline’s
taking any revenge on you, but you have got to fear that she’ll upset
your little game with Dudley Leicester.”

“What’s my little game with Dudley, anyhow?” she said. “I don’t want
him.”

“What Pauline’s going to do is to make a man of him,” Robert Grimshaw
said. “She’ll put some life into him. She’ll put some backbone into
him. He’ll end up by being a pretty representative County Member. But
your game has always been to make a sort of cross between a puppy and a
puppet out of him. It’s that little game that Pauline will spoil.”

She turned a furious red.

“Now, before God,” she said, “I’d have made a good wife to him. You
haven’t the right to say that to me, Robert Grimshaw.” And she picked
furiously at her thick riding-gloves with one hand after the other. “By
Jove, if I’d my crop with me, I think I should lay it over your back.”

“You couldn’t lay it over my back,” he said placidly, “because I’m
sitting down; but I’m not insulting you in that way. I dare say you’d
have been perfectly faithful to Dudley--faithful and probably furiously
jealous too; but you wouldn’t have made a man of him. He’d have lived a
sort of doll’s life under your petticoats. You’d probably have made him
keep a racing-stable, and drop a pot of money at Monte Carlo, and drop
another pot over bridge, and you’d have got him involved all round, and
he’d have dragged along somehow whilst you carried on as women to-day
do carry on. That’s the sort of thing it would have been. Mind! I’m
not preaching to you. If people like to live that sort of life, that’s
their business. It takes all sorts to make a world, but ...”

Lady Hudson suddenly put her hand upon his knee.

“I’ve always believed, Robert Grimshaw,” she said--“I always _did_
believe that it was you who made Dudley break off from me. You’re the
chap, aren’t you, that made him look after his estates, and become a
model landowner, and nurse the county to give him a seat? All that sort
of thing.”

“I’m the chap who did look after his estates,” Robert Grimshaw said.
“I’m not saying that I wouldn’t have influenced Dudley Leicester
against you; I didn’t, as a matter of fact. I never said a word against
you in my life; but it’s possible, of course, that my taking up his
land business, out of sheer meddlesomeness, may have influenced him
against you. Dudley’s got more in him than appears on the surface. Or,
at least, he can stick straight in a way if he is put into it, and just
about that time Dudley got it into his head that he had a duty to his
county and his country, and so on ...”

Etta Stackpole’s fingers moved convulsively.

“Oh, my man,” she said, “what the deuce’s business was it of yours? Why
couldn’t you have let him alone?”

“I’m telling you the worst of what I did to you,” Robert Grimshaw
said. “I didn’t take Dudley Leicester from you. I’ve never said a word
against you, but I probably kept him from coming back to you once he
had thrown you over. I don’t mean to say that I did it by persuasions;
he was dogged enough not to come back, but I dare say he would have
returned to you if he hadn’t had his mind occupied--if I hadn’t
occupied his mind with barn-roofs and rents and field-draining, and the
healthy sort of things that keep a man off women.”

“Oh, you devil!” Etta Hudson said.

“Who’d have thought you had it in you? Where do you get it from? You
look just like any other Park loafer.”

“I suppose,” Robert Grimshaw said speculatively, “it’s because I’m
really Greek. My name’s English, and my training’s been English, and I
look it, and smell it, and talk it, and dress the part; but underneath
I should think I’m really a Dago. You see, I’m much more my mother’s
child than my father’s. She was a Lascarides, and that’s a clan name.
Belonging to a clan makes you have what no Englishman has--a sense of
responsibility. I can’t bear to see chaps of my class--of my clan and
my country--going wrong. I’m not preaching; it’s my private preference.
I can’t bear it because I can’t bear it. I don’t say that you ought to
feel like me. That’s your business.”

“My _word_!” Etta Hudson said with a bitter irony, “we English are
a lost race, then!”

“I never said so,” Robert Grimshaw answered. “I said you were an
irresponsible one. You’ve other qualities, but not that one. But that’s
why I’ve been a sort of Dutch uncle to numbers of young men of our
class. Dudley’s not the only one, but he _is_ the chief of them.”

“And so you took him up, and dry-nursed him, and preached to him ...”

“Oh, I never preached to him,” Grimshaw said; “he had the intelligence
to see ...”

“To see that I’m an undesirable woman?” she asked ironically.

“To see, if it’s held under his nose, that it’s profitable and
interesting and healthy to do the best for the people that Chance,
Providence, whatever it is, has put under him in this world. It helps
them; it helps him. He’s got a desire by now to be a good landlord.
It’s a languid desire, but it’s as much a part of him as his desire to
dress well.”

Etta Stackpole said:

“By gum!”

They were dodging between a huge electric tram and the kerb of a narrow
street beside a grim and squalid brewery; they dipped down under a
railway arch; they mounted a rise, and ran beside a green, gay with
white painted posts and rails, and surrounded by little houses. Etta
looked meditatively in front of her with an air as if she were chewing
tobacco.

“By thunder, as Clemmy van Husum says,” she brought out at last, “you
dry-nursed him till he’s good enough for marrying a little person
you’ve kept in a nursery, and she----”

“She takes charge!” Robert Grimshaw said. “She’ll give him personal
ambition, or if she doesn’t do that she’ll make him act just as if he
had it, in order to please her. He’d kiss the dust off her feet.”

“Thanks,” she said spitefully. “_Rub_ it in.”

The cab swayed along in the gay weather.

“What a father-protector you are,” she said, “according to your own
account, and all because you’re a--what is it?--a Dago? Well, well!
you’ve got all the virtues of Greece and all the virtues of us too.
Well, well, well!”

“Oh, come, come,” Robert Grimshaw said. “I’ve given you your opening;
you’re quite right to take it. But I’ve not the least doubt that I’ve
got the Dago vices if any pressure came to bring ’em out. I dare say I
shouldn’t be straight about money if I were hard up. Fortunately, I’m
not. I dare say I should be untruthful if I ever had occasion to be.
I should be rather too tender-hearted and too slack to get on in the
world if I had to do it--at least, I suppose so.”

She said:

“Well, _well_! _Here’s_ a joke! Here we have--what is it?--a
Dago--a blamed Dago, as Clement P. would say.”

“You know the Van Husums?” Grimshaw interrupted her.

“Oh, I thought I’d tickle you,” she said. “Yes, I know the Van Husums,
and your Katya Lascarides was in their employment, wasn’t she? But I’m
not going to talk of your other flame, Mr. Robert Hurstlett Grimshaw.
You don’t play your Oriental harem trick in this taxi-cab. One man one
girl’s the motto here. I only introduced Clement P.’s name to stir you
up; you’re so _damn_ calm.”

“This is a fight,” Grimshaw said. “You score one and go on.”

“What are we fighting for?” she asked.

“Ah! that’s telling,” he said.

“If you only want to tell me I’m a bad, bad girl,” she said, “I know it
already. I’m rather proud of it.”

“You ought to be,” he said; “you play up to it well. But it’s not that
that would have brought me here. I’ve got an object.”

“Want to make me promise to leave your adopted nephew in peace?” she
asked.

“Oh, Pauline’s taken hold again,” Grimshaw said. “You aren’t going to
have another look in.”

“Oh, I’ve had all I want of him,” she said. “She can have the dregs.”

“That’s a pretty appropriate word at present,” he said. “A good word
for Dudley--dregs.”

“What the deuce do you mean?” she asked. “Anything happened to Dudley?”

“You’ll hear when we get to Bushey,” he said. “I’ll tell you when we
pass the fifth chestnut of the avenue.”

“What the deuce is it?” she asked.

He answered merely:

“Ah!”

Her hard eyes gazed straight forward through the screen of glass.

“Something happened to Dudley?” she said. “And it’s not that his wife’s
lamning into him about me.”

“Oh, Pauline takes it as the negligible thing that it was,” Grimshaw
said.

She uttered:

“Thanks!” still absently. Then “Dregs?” she repeated. Suddenly she
turned upon him and caught hold of his hand.

“It’s not ...” she began.

“You’ll hear when we get to Bushey,” he said. “It’s ten minutes still.”

“Oh, you devil!” she said--“you tormenting devil!”

He just lifted up one hand in token of assent.

“Yes, it’s the function of the devil to torment the damned. You’ve had
what you wanted in Dudley Leicester’s case; now you’ve got to take what
you get for it--from his best friend.”

“His wife’s best friend,” she said.

“And his wife’s best friend,” Grimshaw repeated calmly. They were
shooting fast over bad roads between villas. Etta Stackpole may have
shaken with laughter, or it may have been merely a “Thankee, marm” in
the road.

“Well, it’s a damn funny thing,” she said. “Here’s our Dago God
Almighty splitting himself to set up a bright and beautiful English
family upon its respectable legs. What a lark! I suppose it’s out of
gratitude to the land that gives him hospitality. He picks up a chap
without a backbone and turns him into a good landlord. Then, when
he’s made (I suppose you have made) perfectly sure of his morals, he
hands him over to a bright and beautiful English girl ‘of good family
and antecedents’ (that’s the phrase, ain’t it?), and she’s to run the
dummy along till it turns into a representative Cabinet Minister--not
brilliant, but a good household article. That’s the ticket, isn’t it?”

Grimshaw nodded his head slowly.

“And so the good old bachelor makes a little family for himself--a
little harem that doesn’t go farther than the tea-table--with what
he can get of Katya Lascarides for Sultana No. 1 and Ellida Langham
and child for No. 2. No. 2’s more platonic, but it’s all the same
little dilly-dally, Oriental, father-benefactor game; and No. 3’s
Pauline--little pretty Pauline. Oh, my eye!”

She regarded the gates of the Park flying towards them.

“What is it the Orientals allowed? Four wives and forty of the other
sort? Well, I suppose you’ve plenty of lesser favourites. Why not take
me on, too?”

“Oh, you!” Grimshaw said good-humouredly--“you’d always be upsetting
the apple-cart. You’d have to be bow-stringed.”

“I believe a sort of Sultan father-confessor would be good for me,” she
said, as she gathered her skirts together.

The car had stopped near the dingy yellow Park wall, whose high gates
showed the bourgeoning avenue and the broad, sandy road.

“Well, this has been what you might call a _conversation galante_
so far.”




VI


THEY passed the little weather-beaten and discoloured lodge, waited for
half a dozen deer that with delicate and nonchalant footsteps passed
from the light of the broad road into the shade of the avenue; then
they followed them into the aisle between the columnar trunks, the
vista stretching to an infinite distance. The deep silence of the place
seemed to render them both speechless. She walked, holding her long
skirts held high.

Suddenly Grimshaw said: “Here’s the fifth tree.”

She answered: “I don’t want to hear what’s happened to him.”

“Ah, but you’ve got to.”

She averted her face.

“I know,” she said.

“You’ve heard?”

Her voice was rather muffled when she said: “No. I prophesied it. He’s
had a panic. Perhaps he’s cut his throat. I don’t want to know. It
serves him right.”

“He is mad,” Grimshaw said slowly.

She stood quite still with her back to him. Her broad shoulders heaved.

“All right, it’s my fault,” she said. “You needn’t rub it in. Go away.”

“I’m not saying it’s your fault,” he said. “The point is whether he’s
curable or not. You might possibly help us.”

She stood quite still.

“Why should I want to help you?” she said.

He looked at her statuesque limbs. Beyond her the level grass stretched
out. The little company of deer wandered from a patch of cloud shadow
into a patch of sunlight. The boughs of a small enclosure, heightened
by vivid greens, shook in the April wind.

“Oh, don’t take it too hard,” he said. “I know what it’s like.”

She faced suddenly round upon him, her eyes rather staring.

“Who’s taking it hard?” she said. “Let him rot.” She added: “You devil,
to tell me not to take it hard! What do you know about it? Go and give
someone else hell. I’ve done with you.”

She began to walk away between the trees. After a while he followed her.

“Look here,” he said, “if ...”

She turned violently upon him, her eyes staring, her mouth drawn into a
straight line.

“By God!” she threw out, “if you follow me, I’ll throttle you!”

“Listen,” he said. He called after her: “I don’t believe it’s really
your fault. I’ll wait here and tell you why when you’re ready to hear.”

She walked away fast, and then, finding that he did not pursue her, she
wandered slowly and aimlessly between the tree-trunks. Close to him
a bole of one of the great trees formed a table about knee-high. He
took off his silk hat, and, holding it in his hand, sat down. His face
was an ashy white, and slowly little drops of sweat came out upon his
high forehead. He rose and went into the road, looking upwards along
the avenue. At a little distance she stood leaning one hand against a
tree-trunk, her head bowed down, her long skirt falling all around her
feet, a tall and motionless figure, shadowy and grey amongst the young
green.

He returned to his bole. After a long time another small company of
deer passed quite close at hand. Suddenly they quickened their pace,
their feet rustling on the turf.

“Well,” Etta Hudson said from close beside him, “what is it you want?”

He said: “It’s like this: three days ago Dudley Leicester seemed to
go mad. He assaulted a man after asking him an apparently senseless
question. We have had him under observation ever since. And he’s twice
stopped strangers in the street and asked them the same question.
When they’ve answered ‘No’ he attempts to assault them. He’s got an
attendant now, and if he’s headed off before he can ask the question
he’s calm enough; but he won’t speak a word.”

Etta said: “You might let me sit down there; I can’t stand.” And when
she was on the bole she asked expressionlessly: “What’s the question he
asks?”

“It’s always,” Grimshaw said, “whether the man--a perfect
stranger--rang up your telephone number.”

Etta Stackpole said: “Ah! ...”

She sat silent for a long time, looking down at the ground, Grimshaw
standing before her and looking musingly at her face.

“Well, what is it you want to know?”

“I want to know,” he said, “what happened on the night he saw you home.”

“I didn’t think,” she said expressionlessly, “that you could play the
cad as well as the private detective.”

Robert Grimshaw uttered sharply the one word, “Rot!”

“Well, it’s a cad’s question, and you must have played the private
detective to know that he saw me home.”

“My dear woman,” he said, “don’t the Phyllis Trevors know it, and Mme.
de Mauvesine, and Mme. de Bogota, and half London. I am not making any
accusations.”

“I don’t care a pin if you are,” she said.

“It’s merely a question of this sort,” he went on. “The doctor who’s
in charge of the case wants to know whether he had any shock on that
night. He wasn’t by any chance knocked down at a crossing? He didn’t
fall? The cab horse hadn’t been down?” She shook her head minutely.
“There wasn’t any violent scene? Your husband ...”

“Oh, he ...” she said. “Besides, he was in Paris.” Suddenly she broke
out: “Look here, you don’t know what this means to me. I don’t mean to
say that Leicester’s very much to me, but still, it’s pretty sickening
to have it happen to him.”

“Well”--Grimshaw conceded a point--“I’m not saying that it’s your
fault.”

“Oh, I’m not worrying about whose fault it is,” she said. “It’s him.
It’s the thought of him, poor harmless devil!” She looked up at
Grimshaw. “What doctor have you got? What does he say?”

“We’ve got a man called Wells,” he answered. “He doesn’t say much
either way. He says he can’t tell till he knows what happened.”

She scrutinized his face.

“Look here,” she said, “this _is_ true? You aren’t merely telling
me a tale to get things out of me?” Grimshaw did not even answer her
before she looked desolately down again. “Of course it’s true,” she
said; “you aren’t that sort.”

“And you knew I knew already that he saw you home and that he stayed
two hours,” Grimshaw said. “What I want to know is what gave him a
shock.”

“Ah! ... you’d get that from his servant,” she said. “He’d be sitting
up for Dudley. Well, I don’t care about that; I’d fight any case on
that.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Grimshaw said. “I promise you that Pauline ...”

“Don’t you,” she said suddenly, and clenching her hands, “don’t you
mention that little pink toad to me, if you want to get anything out of
me. I hate her and I hate you! You got Dudley away from me together.
Why, it’s been like devils and angels fighting for a man’s soul. That’s
what it’s _been_. I’m a religious woman, though you mayn’t believe
it. I believe in angels and the devil, too.” She pulled her skirt a
little up from the ground. “I expect you’ll say,” she began again,
“that you’re on the side of the angels. Well, see what you’ve made of
him, poor dear! This wouldn’t have happened if you’d left him to me.
It’s you that are responsible for it all--you, poking your nose into
what doesn’t concern you.”

“Ah!” he said slowly and rather mournfully, “perhaps it has turned
out like that if we get outside and look on. But as to which of us is
which--angel and devil--I should not care to say.”

She looked up at him.

“You wouldn’t?” she said.

“You see,” he said, and he shook his head slowly, “perhaps it’s only
a case of a square peg and a round hole. I don’t know. If you’d had
him you’d have let him be a loafer all his life. Perhaps that’s all
he’s really fitted for. Possibly, by shoving him on to do things,
Pauline and I--or I principally--have brought this sort of thing on.
Englishmen haven’t any sense of responsibility. Perhaps it’s bad for
them to have it aroused in them. They can work; they can fight; they
can do things; but it’s for themselves alone. They’re individualists.
But there is a class that’s got the sense of duty to the whole. They’ve
got a rudimentary sense of it--a tradition, at least, if not a sense.
And Leicester comes of that class. But the tradition’s dying out. I
suppose it was never native to them. It was forced on them because
_someone_ had to do the public work and it was worth their while.
But now that’s changing, it isn’t worth while. So no doubt Dudley
hadn’t got it in his blood.... And yet I don’t know,” he said; “he’s
shaped so well. I would have sworn he had it in him to do it with
careful nursing. And Pauline had it in her--the sense of the whole, of
the clan, the class, the county, and all the rest of it. Women have it
much more often than men. That’s why she isn’t going for you. Only the
other day she said to me: ‘I’m not the sort of girl to give ourselves
away.’”

“Now, look here,” she said, “what right have you, a confounded
foreigner, to run us down? We take you up; we let you be one of us,
and then you gas. There’s a great deal too many of you in the country.
Taken as you are, on your own showing, poor dear Dudley, that you
patronize--damn you--is worth a score of you. If you’re so set on the
public service why isn’t it you who’s standing for Parliament instead
of him? You’re ten times as rich. You’ve a hundred times more the gift
of the gab ...” and she broke off, to begin again.

“Whatever you can say of him,” she said “he doesn’t go nosing out
secrets and peeping and prying. He is straight and clear, and as
innocent as a baby, and as honest as a die....”

“If he’s as honest as a die,” Robert Grimshaw said, “why was he
carrying on an intrigue with you all that time? He must have been
pretty deep to keep it concealed from me.”

She looked up at him with pale fury.

“Oh, you horrible-minded man!” she said. “How dare you! How dare you!
You may kick me as much as you like. I am down. But you let Dudley
Leicester alone. He’s too decent to be jumped on by a man like you.”

Grimshaw displayed a sudden and incomprehensible agitation.

“Then he hadn’t been carrying on with you?” he said.

“Carrying on with me?” she mocked him, but with a bitter scorn. “Do you
mean to say that you suspected him of that? I suppose you suspected
him of fooling about with me before he was married to his Pauline, and
after? What an unspeakable toad of a mind you’ve got!”

Robert Grimshaw said, “Good God!”

She struck her hip with her clenched hand. “I see it,” she said,
“you thought Dudley Leicester had seized the chance of his wife’s
mother being ill to monkey about with me. You thought he’d been doing
it before. You thought he was going to go on doing it. You thought
he’d managed to conceal it from you. You thought he was a deep, dark
ne’er-do-well like yourself or any other man. But I tell you this:
Dudley Leicester’s a man in a thousand. I’m the only person that’s to
blame. I tell you Dudley Leicester hasn’t spoken a word to me since the
day we parted. I tell you I got him just that one night to show myself
what I could do. He couldn’t help being with me; he had to see me home.
We were all at the Esmeralda together, and all the rest of us were
married, or engaged or coupled up somehow. He _had_ to see me home
as we lived next door. He did it with the worst grace in the world. He
tried to get out of it. It was because he behaved so like an oaf that
I set myself to get him. I swear that it is true. I swear as I am a
religious woman. I believe in God and things.”

Again Robert Grimshaw said, “Good God” and his agitation grew on him.

“Well,” Etta Stackpole said, “what is there to get so upset about? It
doesn’t count in Dudley for dissoluteness. There isn’t a man in the
world, not even yourself, Robert Grimshaw, could get out of my having
him if I set myself to it at that time of night and after that sort of
evening. I’m not boasting about it. It’s the nature of the beast that
you men are. I set myself to do it because I knew it would mortify him;
because it would make him feel he was a dirty sort of dog next morning.
What are you in such a stew about?” she said. “It wasn’t anything to
do with Dudley’s real nature. I tell you he’s as pure-minded as a
sucking-lamb.”

Robert Grimshaw was walking nervously up and down, striking the side of
his trousers with his ebony stick.

“Oh,” she said with a sudden gibe, “I know what’s the matter with you;
you’re feeling remorse. You’re upset because you suspected Dudley of
being a mean hound. I know you, Robert Grimshaw. You were jealous of
him; you were madly jealous of him. You married him to that little
pink parroquet and then you got jealous of him. You _wanted_ to
believe that he was mean and deceitful. You wanted to believe that he
was going to turn out a bad hat. You wanted to believe it so that you
could take your Pauline off his hands again, and now you’re feeling
remorse because you suspected him. You knew in your heart that he was
honest and simple and pure, but your jealousy turned you mad; I know
you, Robert Grimshaw. Well, go on feeling remorse. Get all you can of
it. I tell you this: I got Dudley Leicester into my hands and I did
what I wanted with him, and nothing happened to shock him except when
the telephone bell rang and someone recognized his voice. I guess that
was shock enough for him. I thought he was in for something. I could
tell it by the look of his eyes, but that only proves the thorough good
sort he was. It wasn’t till then that he understood what he’d been up
to. Then he was knocked flat.”

“There wasn’t anything else at all?” Robert Grimshaw said. He had
pulled himself together and stood with his stick behind his back,
leaning upon it a little. “Yes I admit I misjudged Dudley; but it’s a
queer sort of world. You’re quite sure there wasn’t anything else?”

“What more do you want?” she asked. “Could a chap like that have had
anything more beastly happen to him? Besides, it’s indicated in the
form you say his madness takes. He’s always asking who it was who rung
us up. Doesn’t it prove that that’s what hit his brain? No, he wasn’t
thrown out of a cab. He didn’t stumble. My husband didn’t turn up, no.
Nothing of the sort. He was just knocked plumb-centre by that chap
saying: ‘Isn’t that Dudley Leicester speaking?’”

Robert Grimshaw’s face was the hue of wood-ash.

“My dear Etta,” he said with his gentle collectiveness. “It’s perfectly
obvious that you aren’t responsible for Dudley’s collapse. It was the
meddling fool at the other end of the telephone.”

“It was rather meddlesome when you come to think of it, but then
perhaps he didn’t know there was anything wrong in Dudley’s being where
he was.”

“Perhaps he didn’t,” Robert Grimshaw said. “Let’s go and have lunch.”

“Oh, I don’t want any lunch,” she said. “Take me home.”

She supported herself on his arm as they walked up the long avenue, for
her footsteps were not very steady.




PART IV




I


“OH no,” the specialist said, “I don’t see what purpose it would
serve, your telling his wife exactly what happened. I prefer, indeed,
that you should not. No doubt it was the shock of hearing the voice
on the telephone that actually induced the state of mind. But to know
the fact doesn’t help us--it doesn’t help us towards the cure. All
we can do is to wait. His chance is that he’s not such a very young
man. If it had happened ten years ago there wouldn’t have been any
chance for him at all; but the brain-fibre--what the Germans call the
_Hirnstoff_--is tougher now. Anyhow, we can’t say.”

Sir William Wells, an unreasonably lugubrious man of fifty, having
in his eyes the look of a man doomed beyond hope, with ruffled grey
hair, an untidy grey beard, very dark eyebrows, a whitish complexion,
in which tints of blue predominated, except that on his cheek-bones
were patches of red so bright that he had the appearance of having
rouged--with an air, in fact, of having had all his hair ruffled up
the wrong way, and of remaining still a personage of importance--Sir
William Wells repeated:

“All we can do is to wait.”

“Don’t you think,” Robert Grimshaw said--they were in the great man’s
first-class consulting-room--a tall place, very gay, with white
walls, bright plaster-worked ceiling, chairs with seats and backs of
scarlet leather, and numerous cabinets inlaid with green and yellow
wood, very shiny and new, and yet conveying a sinister suspicion that
they contained not rose-leaves, silks, or bibelots, but instruments,
diagrams, and disinfectants--“don’t you think,” Robert Grimshaw said,
“that, since his mania, if it is a mania, is so much along the lines of
his ordinary character, that is an indication that his particular state
is not so very serious?”

“My dear sir,” the specialist answered, “what we’ve got to do is
to establish whether there is or isn’t a lesion in the brain. His
character’s nothing to do with it.”

“Of course we’re in your hands,” Grimshaw answered, “but I should have
thought that a man who’s been abnormal all his life ...”

“My dear sir,” Sir William repeated, shaking his glasses as if
minatorily at Grimshaw’s nose, “have you any profession? I suppose
not. But if you had a profession you would know how utterly impossible
the suggestions of laymen are to the professional. People come to
me for this sort of thing because I have had thousands--literally,
thousands--of similar cases. It’s no good my considering individual
eccentricities; my business is to put my finger on the spot.”

“Then, what do you propose to do?” Grimshaw said.

“Nothing,” the specialist answered. “For the present, absolutely
nothing.”

“But don’t you think a change ...” Grimshaw suggested.

Having entirely redecorated his house from top to bottom in order to
indicate that he was more prosperous than Dr. Gegg of No. 161, Sir
William, who was heavily indebted to Jews, was upon the turning-point
between bankruptcy and possible salvation.

“No,” he said determinedly, so that he seemed to bay like a dog from
his chest, “certainly not. If I am to cure him, I must have him under
my own close personal attention. There’s nothing to be done but to
wait.”

He rose upon the points of his toes, and then brought his heels sharply
down upon the floor.

“You understand, we know nothing yet. Your friend doesn’t speak a word.
He’s no doubt aware that he’s watched. He has a companion whom I have
personally instructed, and who will report to me. Get him to take as
much exercise as he can. Keep him fairly quiet, but have him in the
room when cheerful people are about. I will drop in at every moment of
the day that I can spare.”

He paused to glare at Robert Grimshaw.

“I’m a very busy man, but I’ll pay special attention to your friend’s
case. I will try to be always in and out of Mr. Leicester’s house. More
I can’t do.”

Backed up as he was by Katya Lascarides’ suggestion that Sir William
was a good man, Grimshaw felt an intense satisfaction--even a
gratitude--to Sir William; and whilst he slipped his five-pound
note carefully wrapped round five shillings under the specialist’s
paper-weight, which was made of one huge aqua-marine, he uttered a
formal speech of thanks.

“Mind,” Sir William shouted at him as he reached the door, “I don’t
promise you a cure. I’m not one of those quacks. But you know my
position, and you know my reputation. I work from ascertained facts,
not from theories. If it were possible to communicate with your
friend--if he’d speak, or if it were possible to manipulate him--we
might get at something. If, for instance, we could get him to stand
with his heels together, his hands at his sides, and his eyes shut; but
we can’t get him to speak, and he doesn’t listen when he’s spoken to.
There’s nothing to do but wait until he does.”


A period of strain, enhanced by the continual droppings in of Sir
William Wells, ensued for the house in Curzon Street, and nothing
happened, save that they all became personally acquainted with Sir
William’s idiosyncrasies. They discovered that he had a singular
prejudice against the eating of fish; that he was exceedingly insolent
to the servants; that he read the _Daily Telegraph_; that he liked
the singing of Scotch comedians, and considered all ballet-dancers to
be physically abnormal. They also had the perpetual company of a gentle
and black-haired youth called Held. This young man, with a singular
slimness and taciturnity, had been put in by Sir William as if he were
a bailiff in possession of Dudley Leicester. Dudley Leicester never
spoke, the young man hardly ever; but he was exceedingly nice in his
table manners, and eventually Pauline made the discovery at dinner that
he very much disliked cats, and was a Christian Scientist. And with
these additions the household continued its way.

To Robert Grimshaw the bright spot in this tenebrous affair was the
inflexible tranquillity of Pauline Leicester. Looking back upon it
afterwards he seemed to see her upon the background of his own terrible
pain--to see her as a golden and vibrating spot of light. She spoke
about the weather, about some improvements that were being made in the
village of Icking, about the forthcoming General Election, about her
clothes. She went everywhere that she could go without her husband.
She went to “at homes,” to private views, she was “at home.” She had
Dudley himself in her drawing-room where in the farther comers young
Mr. Held and Ellida Langham held animated conversations so close to his
passive form that it might appear that, monosyllabic as he always was,
he was at least attentive to the conversation. She drove regularly in
the Park with Dudley beside her, and most often with Robert Grimshaw
sitting opposite them; but she never mentioned her husband’s condition
to Grimshaw, and her face wore always its little, tender smile. He
was aware that in her there was a certain determination, almost a
fierceness. It wasn’t that in her deep black her face was more pallid,
or that her features hardened. It wasn’t that she chattered less. Her
little tongue was going perpetually, with its infantile gaiety, if her
eyes were for ever on the watch.

There was, moreover, a feeling of a General Election in the air--of
that General Election in which Dudley, as a foregone conclusion, was
to replace the member sitting for his division of the county; and one
afternoon Robert Grimshaw came in to one of Pauline’s “at homes.” The
little encampment round Dudley Leicester had its place usually in
the small, back drawing-room which Dudley’s great chair and Ellida’s
enormous hat and Mr. Held’s slim figure almost contrived to fill.
Dudley sprawled back, his complexion perfectly clear, his eyes gazing
abstractedly before him, perfectly normal, perfectly healthy, on show
for anyone who chose to look at him; and Ellida and Mr. Held joined
in an unceasing and animated discussion on Christian Science. Robert
Grimshaw, having addressed a word or two to Madame de Bogota, and
having nodded to Mr. Balestier, who sat for a Midland county, and
having shaken hands with Mrs. Jimtort, the wife of a Recorder of a
south-western city, was moving slowly up to close in the little group
in the background. And suddenly, with an extraordinary running step,
Dudley Leicester shot past him straight at the member for the Midland
county. He had brought out the words: “Are you the man ...” when
already shooting, as it were sideways, between the people, Mr. Held had
very lightly touched his wrist.

“You know,” he said, “that you’re _not_ to talk politics this
afternoon. We’re all tired out.”

Leicester passed his hand lightly down his face, and, turning slowly,
went back to his arm-chair.

Mr. Balestier opened his eyes rather wide; he was a stoutish,
clean-shaven man of forty-five with a rather disagreeable expression,
who, probably because he was interested in South American railways,
went about everywhere with the Senhora de Bogota.

“Oh, I say,” he ejaculated to Pauline, “you have got them under your
thumb, if it’s you who insists they’re not to talk politics. It seems
to act like a military command.”

And Pauline stifled a yawn with her tiny hand.

“Well, it’s perfectly true what Dudley’s secretary says. We are all
nearly worn out, so you’ll have to excuse my yawning,” Grimshaw heard
her say from behind his back. “And Dudley hasn’t been really well since
he had the ‘flu.’”

“Oh, you’re altogether too nervous,” Mr. Balestier’s fat voice came.
“Dudley’s absolutely certain of his seat, and as for not well, why,
he’s a picture of ox-like health. Just look at him!”

“But he’s so terribly thorough,” Pauline answered. “He’s much too
wrapped up in this work. Why, he thinks about nothing else all day and
all night. If you watch him you’ll see he hardly ever speaks. He’s
thinking, I wouldn’t mind betting, about how to win the heart of a man
called ”Down,“ with red whiskers, who’s an Antipedobaptist and not our@@@
tenant, and supposed to be able to influence thirty Nonconformists’
votes. You just keep your eye on Dudley.”

“Oh, I’ll take your word for his industry,” Mr. Balestier said. “But
I’ve got something much better worth keeping my eyes on.”

“Is that meant for you or me, Madame de Bogota?” Pauline said. “Or
possibly it’s you, Mrs. Jimtort!”

“As a matter of fact,” Mr. Balestier said, “I was thinking of
Grimshaw’s dog. I feel convinced he’ll have a piece out of my leg, one
of these days.”

Robert Grimshaw meanwhile was supporting himself with one hand on the
blue curtains that decorated the archway between the two rooms. He was
positively supporting himself; the sudden shock of Leicester’s shooting
past him had left him weak and trembling. And suddenly he said:

“What’s the good?”

Ellida--for even Ellida had not yet recovered from the panic of
Dudley’s swift evasion--took with avidity this opening for a
recommencement of one of her eternal and animated conversations with
Mr. Held.

“What’s the good of exposing these impostures?” she said. “Why, all the
good in the world. Think of all the unfortunate people that are taken
in....”

And so she talked on until Mr. Held, the name of Mrs. Mary Baker G.
Eddy upon his lips, plunged again into the fray.

But Robert Grimshaw was not asking what was the good of Christian
Science. He had turned his back upon the front room. Nevertheless,
every word that Pauline uttered had at once its hearing, its meaning,
and its painful under-meaning in his ears. And when he had said,
“What’s the good?” it had been merely the question of what was the
good of Pauline’s going on with these terrible vigilances, this
heart-breaking pretence. And through his dreadfully tired mind
there went--and the vision carried with it a suggestion of sleep,
of deep restfulness--the vision of the logical sequence of events.
If they let Dudley Leicester down, if they no longer kept up the
pretence--the pretence that Dudley Leicester was no more an engrossed
politician--then Dudley Leicester would go out of things, and he and
Pauline ... he and Pauline would fall together. For how long could
Pauline keep it up?

The cruelty of the situation--of each word that was uttered, as of
each word that she uttered in return, the mere impish malignancy of
accidental circumstances--all these things changed for the moment his
very view of Society. And the people sitting behind him--Madame de
Bogota, with the voluptuous eyes and the sneering lips; Mrs. Jimtort,
whose lips curved and whose eyes were cold; Mr. Balestier, whose eyes
rolled round and round, so that they appeared to be about to burst out
of his head, and the deuce only knows what they didn’t see or what
conclusions they wouldn’t draw from what they did see--these three
seemed to be a small commission sent by Society to inquire into the
state of a household where it was suspected something was “wrong.” He
realized that it was probably only the state of his nerves; but every
new word added to his conviction that these were not merely “people,”
bland, smiling, idle, and innocuous--good people of social contacts.
They were, he was convinced, Inquisitors, representing each a separate
interest--Mrs. Jimtort standing for provincial Society, Madame de
Bogota for all the cosmopolitanism of the world’s centre that Western
London is, and Balestier for the Party. And outside there seemed to
be--he seemed to hear them--the innumerable whispers of the tongues of
all Society, canvassing the results of the report that would be brought
back by this committee of inquiry. It worked up, indeed, to an utterly
abominable climax when Balestier, with his rather strident voice,
exclaimed:

“Why don’t you let me mote you down to Well-lands one day, Mrs.
Leicester? You ought to know the Hudsons. Lady Etta’s a peach, as I
learned to say when I went over with the Newfoundland Commission.”

And at that even Ellida threw up her hands and gazed, her lips parted,
into Grimshaw’s eyes. From behind his back, a minute before, there had
come little rustlings of people standing up. He had heard Pauline say:

“What, you can’t all be going at once?” and he had heaved a great sigh
of relief. But in the dead silence that followed Mr. Balestier’s words,
whilst Robert Grimshaw was wondering whether Balestier had merely
and colossally put his almost ox-like foot into it, or whether this
actually was a “try on,” Pauline’s voice came:

“Oh, not just yet. I’m in mourning, you know. I think I go out a little
too much as it is.”

“Oh, she’s saved the situation again!” And then irresistibly it
came over him to ask what was the good of this eternally saving the
situation that neither of them really wanted to maintain. “She should,”
he said to himself fiercely, “give it up.” He wasn’t going to stand
by and see her tortured. Dudley Leicester had given in, and serve him
right, the cad! For all they could tell, he was having the time of his
life. Why shouldn’t they do the same?


“Oh, isn’t she _wonderful_!” Ellida exclaimed suddenly. “I don’t
wonder....” And then she gazed at him with her plaintive eyes. The
slim, dark Mr. Held brought out suddenly:

“It’s the most wonderful ...” but his voice died away in his jaws.
“After all,” he continued as suddenly, “perhaps she’s holding the
thought. You see, we Christian Scientists ...” But again his voice died
away; his dark eyes gazed, mournful and doglike, at Pauline’s dimly-lit
figure.

The tall, small room, with its large white panels, to which the frames
of pale-tinted pictures gave an occasional golden gleam, had about
it an air of blue dimness, for the curtains, straight at the sides,
and half concealing the very tall windows, were of a transparent and
ultramarine network. The little encampment around Dudley Leicester
occupied a small back drawing-room, where the window, being of stained
glass that showed on its small, square panels the story of St. George,
was, on account of its tall, dark furniture, almost in gloom. Little,
and as it were golden, Pauline stood motionless in the middle of the
room; she looked upon the floor, and appeared lost in reflection.
Then she touched one side of her fair hair, and without looking up
she came silently towards them. Ellida was upon the point of running
towards her, her arms outstretched, and of saying: “You _are_
wonderful!” but Pauline, with her brown eyes a little averted, brought
out without any visible emotion, as if she were very abstracted, the
words: “And how is your little Kitty? She is still at Brighton with
Miss Lascarides? Robert dear, just ring the bell for the tea-things to
be taken away.”


It was as if the strain upon her rendered her gently autocratic to
Robert Grimshaw, who watched her from another point, having settled
himself down in the arm-chair before the window looking into the
little back room. Against the rows of the stained-glass window Ellida
Langham appeared all black, impulsive, and ready as it were to stretch
out her arms to enfold this little creature in her cloak, to hide her
face under the great black hat with the drooping veil and the drooping
feathers. But as he understood it, Pauline fended off these approaches
by the attentive convention of her manner. They were in face of Dudley
Leicester’s condition; they had him under their eyes, but Pauline was
not going--even to the extent of accepting Ellida’s tenderness--to
acknowledge that there was any condition about Dudley Leicester
at all. It wasn’t, of course, that Ellida didn’t know, for Robert
Grimshaw himself had told her, and Ellida, with her great and impulsive
tenderness, had herself offered to come round and to play at animated
conversations with Dudley and Mr. Held. But except by little pressures
of the hand at meeting or at parting, and by little fluttering
attentions to Ellida’s hats and toilets when she rose to go, Pauline
was not going to show either gratitude or emotion for the moment. It
was her way of keeping her flag flying. And he admired her for it as he
admired her for everything, and looking down at Peter between his feet,
Robert shook his head very sadly. “Perhaps,” he thought to himself,
“until she knows it’s hopeless, she’s not going to acknowledge even to
herself that there’s anything the matter at all.”




II


BETWEEN his feet Peter’s nostrils jerked twice, and a little bubble
of sound escaped. He was trying to tell his master that a bad man was
coming up the stairs. It was, however, only Sir William Wells who,
with his brisk straightforwardness and his frowning authority, seemed
to push himself into the room as its master, and to scatter the tables
and chairs before him. In his harsh and minatory tones he informed them
that the Marchioness of Sandgate had gone to Exeter with Mrs. Jjohns,
and then he appeared to scatter the little group. It was, indeed, as if
he had thrown Ellida out of the room, so quickly--whilst she exclaimed
over her shoulder to Grimshaw: “Well, you’ll be round to dinner?”--did
she disappear.

With his rasping voice, shaking his glasses at her, Sir William
continued for some minutes to inform Pauline of the movements of
those of his patients who were of political prominence. They were
his patients of that class uneasily dispersing over the face of the
country, opening bazaars, bowling the first balls of cricket-seasons,
devising acts of graciousness all night, putting them into practice all
day, and perpetually shaking hands that soiled their delicate gloves.
For that particular world was full of the whispered words “General
Election.” When it was coming no one seemed to know, for the Prime
Minister with his amiable inscrutability very reasonably distrusted
the great majority of his followers. This disconcerted innumerable
hostesses, for no one knew when they wouldn’t have to pack up bag and
baggage and bolt like so many rabbits back to their burrows. This
febrile condition gave occupation of a secretarial kind to great
numbers of sleek and smooth-haired young gentlemen, but it was very
hard upon the London tradesman.

It was, Robert Grimshaw was thinking, very hard upon Pauline, too. He
couldn’t be absolutely certain what she meant to do in case the General
Election came before Dudley could make some sort of appearance in the
neighbourhood of Cove Park. In the conversations that he had had with
her they had taken it for tacitly understood that he was to be well--or
at least that he was to be well enough for Pauline to run him herself.

But supposing it was to be a matter of some years, or even of some
months? What was Pauline thinking of when she thought of the General
Election that hung over them? Mustn’t it add to her suspense? And
he wondered what she meant to do. Would she simply stick Leicester
in bed and give it out that he had a temporary illness, and run the
election off her own bat? She had already run Leicester down in their
car all over the country roads, going dead slow and smiling at the
cottagers. And there wasn’t much chance of the other side putting up a
candidate....

Between his feet Peter was uttering little bubbles of dissatisfaction
whenever Sir William spoke, as if his harsh voice caused the small
dog the most acute nervous tension. Grimshaw whistled in a whisper
to keep the animal quiet. “All these details,” Grimshaw thought,
Pauline had all these details to attend to, an incessant vigilance, a
fierce determination to keep her end up, and to do it in silence and
loneliness. He imagined her to be quivering with anxiety, to be filled
with fear. He _knew_ her to be all this. But Sir William, having
ceased to impart his social information, turned his brows upon his
patient, and Pauline came from the back room to sit down opposite him
by the fireplace. And all she had to say was: “These coals really are
very poor!”


Silence and loneliness. In the long grass, engrossed, mere small spots
of black, the starlings in a little company went about their task. From
beneath the high trees came the call of the blackbirds echoing in true
wood-notes, and overhead a wood-pigeon was crooning incessantly. The
path ran broad down the avenue. The sounds of the wood-cutters at work
upon the trees felled that winter were sharp points in the low rumble
from a distance, and over all the grass that could be seen beneath the
tree-trunks there hung a light-blue haze.

Having an unlit cigarette between his fingers Grimshaw felt in his
pocket for his matchbox, but for the first time in many years the
excellent Jervis had forgotten to fill it. And this in his silence and
his loneliness was an additional slight irritant. There was undoubtedly
a nostalgia, a restlessness in his blood, and it was to satisfy this
restless desire for change of scene that he had come from his own end
of the Park into Kensington Gardens. Peter was roaming unostentatiously
upon his private affairs, and upon his seat Grimshaw leaned forward
and looked at the ground. He had been sitting like that for a long
time quite motionless when he heard the words: “You will not, I think,
object to my sharing your seat? I have a slight fit of dizziness.” He
turned his head to one side and looked up. With a very long, square
and carefully tended grey beard, with very long and oiled locks, with
a very chiselled nose, high dark brows and complexion as of marble,
and upon his head a black cylindrical hat, wearing a long black
cassock that showed in its folds the great beads of a wooden rosary,
an Orthodox priest was towering over him. Robert Grimshaw murmured:
“Assuredly not, Father,” in Greek, and silently the priest sat down at
the other end of the bench. His face expressed aloofness, severity, and
a distant pride that separated him from all the rest of the world. He,
too, sat silent for a very long time, his eyes gazing down through the
trees over the Serpentine and into immense distances. Robert Grimshaw
looked distastefully at the unlit cigarette which he held between his
fingers, and then he observed before him a man who might have been
fifty, with watery blue eyes and a red nose, his clothes and hat all a
mossy green with age and between his lips a misformed cigarette.

“You haven’t got a light?” Grimshaw said, and the man fumbled in his
pocket, producing a greasy, blue box which he pushed open to exhibit
its emptiness.

“Oh, well, give me a light from your cigarette,” Grimshaw said.

A hesitancy came over the man’s whole being, but reluctantly he
surrendered the feeble vapour tube. Grimshaw took his light.

“Oh, here,” he said, and he drew out his bulky case, “that your last?
Here, take one of mine,” and he shook his case over the extended palm.
The cigarettes fell into it in a little shower.

“That’ll keep you going for a bit. Thanks, it’s nothing. I’m only
obliged to you for the light. I wanted it.”

“Ah, you do want it when you do, guv’nor,” the man said. Then he walked
off, lifting his feet a little higher, with a little colour in his
cheeks and his back more erect.

“Poor devil!” Grimshaw said, half to himself.

“Surely,” the priest said beside him in fluting and lofty tones, “are
we not all poor devils in the sight of the Ruler of Ages?”

Robert Grimshaw minutely bowed his head.

“Your dizziness has left you, Father?” he asked. “It is the long
fasting. I was on the watch for you to fall.”

“You speak Greek,” the priest said, “and are acquainted with the
practices of the Church?” It was then just the end of Lent, for Easter
fell very late that year.

“My mother was a Lascarides and I have many interests in Greece,”
Grimshaw answered.

“Ah! the Lascarides were very faithful,” the priest said. “It was they
in the main who helped us to build the church here.”

“The church can’t be much more than a stone’s-throw from here. I was
wondering what brought you.”

“I am glad you are Greek,” the Father said, “for I think it was a
very good charity you did just now, and you spoke to that man like a
brother, which is not what the best of these English can do.”

“Oh, come!” Grimshaw said, “the English have their virtues.”

The priest bowed his head in courtesy.

“It is one of their traditions,” Robert Grimshaw said, “to give tobacco
instead of pence to beggars. It is less demoralizing.”

Again the priest bowed.

“Precisely so,” he said. “It is less demoralizing. It gives less
pleasure. I imagine that when the English blest spirit descends from
heaven once a year to the place of torment, he will bear a drop of
water to place upon the sufferer’s tongue. It will be less demoralizing
than the drop of healing oil that you and I will bear. Also, it will
teach the poor soul to know its place.... Tell me, my son,” he added
suddenly, “do we not, you and I, feel lonely in this place?”

“Well, it is a very good place,” Robert Grimshaw said. “I think it is
the best place in the world.”

“_Eemeision_!” the priest said. “I do not say that it is not. And
in that is shown the truth of the saying: ‘How evil are the good places
of this world!’”

“Assuredly you have fasted long, Father,” Grimshaw said.

“To a demoralizing degree!” the priest answered ironically. “And let
us consider where that leads us. If we have fasted long, we have given
ourselves to the angelic hosts. We have given our very substance to
these sweet beggars. So we have demoralized the poor of heaven by the
alms of our bodies.”

“Surely,” Robert Grimshaw said, “if we overburden our bodies with
fasting, we demoralize the image of our Creator and Saviour?”

“Not so!” the priest thundered suddenly, and his eyes blazed far back
in his skull. “We have mortified this our body which is from the devil,
and in the lowness of the tides of this life we see the truth. For I
tell you that when we see this place to be lonely, then, indeed, we see
the truth, and when we say that it is pleasant, we lie foully.”

“Then, indeed,” Robert Grimshaw said, “we--I mean you and I--are to
be creatures of two natures. We shall follow our passions--if they be
passions of well-doing--till they lead us, as always they must, into
evil.”

“And,” the priest assented, “we must purge then from us that
satisfaction of well-doing and well-being by abstentions and by
fastings, and by thinking of the things that are not of this world.”

“It is strange,” Robert Grimshaw said, “to hear your conversation. I
have heard so little of these things since I was a very young man. But
you teach me now as my aunt and foster-mother taught me at her knee.
She was Mrs. Peter Lascarides.”

“I knew her,” the priest said. “She was a very good woman. You could
not have had a better teacher.”

“And yet,” Robert Grimshaw said, “it was from her teaching that I have
evolved what has been the guiding phrase of my life: ‘Do what you want
and take what you get for it.’”

“And God in His mercy pardon the ill we do.” The priest crossed himself.

“I had forgotten that,” Grimshaw said, and he added gravely: “God in
His mercy pardon the ill I have done.”

“May it be pardoned to you,” the priest said. He stopped for a moment
to let the prayer ascend to Heaven. Then he added didactically: “With
that addition your motto is a very good one; for, with a good training,
a man should have few evil instincts. And to do what you want, unless
obviously it is evil, is to follow the dictates of the instincts that
God has placed in you. Thus, if you will feast, feast; if you will
fast, fast; if you will be charitable to your neighbour, pour out your
goods into the outstretched hands of the poor. Then, if you chance to
give three scudi into the hands of a robber, and with these three scudi
he purchase a knife wherewith he slay his brother, God may well pardon
it to you, who hung, omnipotent, upon the Cross, though thereby to
Cæsar was left power to oppress many of the Churches.”

“So that we should not think too much of the effects of our deeds?”
Robert Grimshaw asked.

“Not too much,” the priest said. “For then we shall lose much Christian
charity. I know a lady who resides near our church and is noted for
a frosty sort of charity, going with tracts into the poorer regions.
I have heard that she said once to her niece: ‘My dear, never keep a
diary; it may be used against you!’” The priest pronounced these words
with a singular mixture of laughter and contempt. “Do you not hear all
England speaking in these words?” he asked suddenly.

A nurse, tall, pink and white, with a dove-coloured veil and cloak,
passed them, with averted face, pushing in a low cart a child, whose
blue eyes gazed with contentment upon the tree-tops.

“Well, hasn’t it given us that?” Grimshaw said.

“Yes, it has given that to the world,” the priest said. “A menial
who averts her eyes--a child who is inanimate by force of being kept
‘good’--a ‘good’ child. My son, a ‘good’ child is a thing to make the
angels cry; for is it not recorded of our Comforter that once He struck
His mother?”

“But should not the nursemaid avert her eyes?” Grimshaw said.

“Consider,” the black pope answered, “with what a laughing glance she
would have passed you had she been a Cypriote; or how she would have
gazed till her eyes started from her head at an English Bishop. But as
for this girl, she averts her gaze. Her aunt has told her that it might
be used against her.”

“It might be used against her, you know,” Grimshaw said.

“Oh, my son,” the priest said, “for what has God given a maiden eyes,
save to use them in innocent glances? And what use is the teaching of
our Church if passer-by may not smile upon passer-by and pass the time
of day by well-heads and in the shady groves? It may be used against
them. But tell me this, my son: Are there not four times more fallen
women and brothels in one-half of this city than in all Greece and
Cyprus and the Isles?”

“Yet there there is not one such nursemaid,” Grimshaw said. “And it is
that that our civilization has bent all its energies to produce. That,
without doubt, is why you and I are lonely here.” He added: “But is it
not wiser to strive to produce nursemaids?”

“Son,” the priest asked, “will you not come with me and confess your
troubles? For I am very certain that you have troubles. You have, is
it not, done what you wanted; you are now, therefore, taking what you
get for it? I have heard you say, may God pardon the ill you have done!
It is not that you regret having rained your cigarettes upon that poor
man?”

“Ah, I regret that less than other things,” Grimshaw said.

“Because you asked him first for the service of a light?”

“Why,” Grimshaw answered, “in this case I had really need of a light.
But I confess that quite often I have asked poor men for lights when I
had my own, that I might give them a taste of good tobacco.”

“And why did you first ask them for a light?” the priest asked. “Was it
that they might not be demoralized?”

“I hardly know,” Grimshaw said. “I think it was to get into touch with
them--to precede the pleasure of the tobacco with the pleasure of
having done me a service. One doesn’t inquire so closely into one’s
motives.”

“Ah,” the black pope answered, “from that alone one may perceive that
you are not English, for the English do not, like you, seek to come
into contact with their fellow-beings or with persons whom they may
meet by chance. They are always afraid of entanglements--that it may be
used against them.”

Robert Grimshaw leaned forward over his stick. It was pleasant to him
to come into contact with this representative of an unseen world--to
come for a moment out of the ring, very visible and circumscribed,
in which he moved. It gave him, as it were, a chance to stand upon a
little hill and look down into the misty “affair” in which he was so
deeply engaged.

“Then you don’t advise me,” he said suddenly in English, “to pull up my
sticks--to wash my hands of things and people and affections?”

“Assuredly,” the priest said, “I do not advise you to give away your
little dog for fear that one day it will die and rend your heart.”

Grimshaw looked meditatively at Peter, who was flapping through the
grass, his nose tracking some delicious odour beyond the path just
opposite them.

“I certainly will not give away my little dog,” Grimshaw said.

He meditated for a little longer, then he stood up, straightening
himself, with his stick behind his back.

“I know I may not offer you my arm,” he said, “to take you back to your
church.”

The priest smiled gently.

“That is forbidden to you,” he said, “for it would militate against
the dignity of my appearance; but all other human contacts lie open to
you. Cherish them.” The haughty curve of his brows became militant; his
voice took on the tone of a challenger. “Go out into the world; help
all that you may; induce all that you may to go into the right paths.
Bring one unto the other, that mutual comprehension may result. That
is the way of Christian fellowship; that is the way to bring about the
peace of God on earth.”

“And pray God to forgive any ill that I may do,” Grimshaw answered.

“That, too,” the priest answered; and, tall, haughty, his brows very
arched, his hair curled and his beard tended, he moved slowly away
towards the gates, casting looks, apparently of indignation, at the
chestnut-blossoms of the avenue.




III


THAT night Robert Grimshaw dined at the Langhams’. Little Kitty was
still at Brighton with Katya, and the room, in the pleasant shade of a
hanging-lamp above the table, was tranquil and soothing. Paul Langham,
who was the director of a bank doing most of its business with the
Orient, was a blond gentleman with a high nose, able to pass from the
soup to the coffee without speaking a word. And having that afternoon
purchased at a railway bookstall an engineer’s puzzle, by means of
which sixteen crescents of orange-coloured cardboard could be made to
fit the form of a perfect circle into a square box, Ellida was more
engaged with these little coloured objects than with either of her
companions.

And suddenly Mr. Held was in the room. He had the air of springing from
the dark floor into the little circle of light that the lamp cast. His
black hair hung down over his ears, his great black eyes were luminous
and very open, and his whole gentle being appeared to be pervaded by
some deep excitement.

“I thought if you’d just come round,” he said in a deep voice, with
extreme embarrassment. Robert Grimshaw was already half out of his
chair, but to his, “What is it?” Mr. Held replied only, “I don’t know
that it’s anything, but I should like you just to come round.”

Robert Grimshaw was in the hall and then in the street beside the
figure of Mr. Held, who, with his dancing and hurrying step and his
swarthy but extreme leanness, had the grotesque appearance of an
untried tragic actor. It wasn’t that Dudley was any worse, he said,
and it wasn’t--no, certainly it wasn’t, that he’d made any attack upon
Pauline. It was simply that he would like Mr. Grimshaw just to come
round.

In the drawing-room in Curzon Street Pauline was sitting chafing
Dudley Leicester’s hands between her own, and Robert Grimshaw never
quite understood what it was that had led the young man to call him
in. By cross-questioning him a great deal later he discovered that
young Mr. Held had conceived a mournful but enormous tenderness for
Pauline. It was, indeed, enough to see how from a distance his enormous
eyes pored like a spaniel’s over her tiny figure, or to see how, like
a sprinter starting to make a record, he would spring from one end
of the drawing-room to fetch her a footstool before she could even
select a chair upon which to sit down. It couldn’t be said that he
did not brood over Dudley Leicester with efficiency and attention,
for that obviously was one of the services he rendered her. But the
whole of his enthusiasm went into his attempts to foresee what in
little things Pauline would be wanting. And, as he explained later to
Robert Grimshaw, that day he had felt--he had felt it in his bones,
in his soul--that Pauline was approaching a crisis, a breakdown of
her personality. It wasn’t anything she had done; perhaps it was
rather what she hadn’t, for she had sat that whole afternoon holding
Leicester’s hand, rubbing it between her own, without speaking, looking
straight in front of her. And suddenly he had a feeling--he couldn’t
explain it. Perhaps, he said, Christian Science had had something to do
with it--helped him to be telepathic.

But, sitting as she always did, perched on the arm of the chair where
Leicester sprawled, Pauline simply turned her head to the door at
Grimshaw’s entry.

“This doctor’s no good,” she said, “and the man he’s called in in
consultation’s no good. What’s to be done?”

And then, like Mr. Held himself, Robert Grimshaw had a “feeling.”
Perhaps it was the coldness of her voice. That day Sir William Wells
had called in a confrère, a gentleman with red hair and an air of
extreme deafness; and, wagging his glasses at his friend, Sir William
had shouted:

“What d’you say to light baths? _Heh_? What d’you say to zymotic
massage? _Heh_?” whilst his friend had looked at Dudley with
a helpless gaze, dropping down once or twice to feel Leicester’s
pulse, and once to press his eyeball. But he did not utter a word,
and to Grimshaw, too, the spectacle of these two men standing over
the third--Sir William well back on his heels, his friend slouched
forward--had given him a sudden feeling of revulsion. They appeared
like vultures. He understood now that Pauline, too, had had the same
feeling.

“No, they don’t seem much good,” he said.

She uttered, with a sudden fierceness, the words:

“Then it’s up to you to do what’s to be done.”

Robert Grimshaw recoiled a minute step.

“Oh, I don’t mean,” she said, “because it’s your fault, but simply--I
can’t think any more. It’s too lonely, yet I can’t talk about it. I
can’t.”

Mr. Held, his mouth wide open with agony, glided out of the room,
squeezing his ascetic hands together.

“But ...” Robert Grimshaw said.

“Oh, I know,” she answered. “I _did_ talk to you about it. But it
does not somehow seem to be right any more. Don’t you understand? Not
only because it isn’t delicate or it doesn’t seem the right thing to
talk about one’s relations with one’s husband, but simply ... I can’t.
I can keep things going; I can run the house and keep it all dark....
But is he going to get well, or isn’t he? We know nothing. And I can’t
face the question alone. I can _do_ things. It drives me mad to
have to think about them. And I’ve no one to talk to, not a relation,
not a soul in the world.”

“You aren’t angry with me?” Grimshaw asked.

“Angry!” she answered, with almost a touch of contempt in her voice.
“Good heavens! I’d dust your shoes for all you’ve done for us, and for
all you’re doing. But you’ve got to do more. You’ve got to do much
more. And you have to do it alone.”

“But ...” Robert Grimshaw said.

Pauline remained silent. She began again to chafe Dudley Leicester’s
hands between her little palms. Suddenly she looked hard at Grimshaw.

“Don’t you understand?” she said. “I do, if you don’t, see where we’re
coming to.” His face expressed a forced want of comprehension, as if he
were afraid. She looked remorselessly into his eyes.

“It’s no use hiding our heads in the sand,” she said, and then she
added in cold and precise words:

“You’re love with me and I’m in love with you. We’re drifting,
drifting. But I’m not the woman to drift. I mean to do what’s right,
and I mean to make you. There’s no more to be said.”

Robert Grimshaw walked to the farthest end of the tall room. He
remained for a long time with his face to the corner. He attempted no
denial. He could not deny, and once again he seemed older. His voice
was even a little husky when, looking at her feet, he said:

“I can’t think what’s to be done,” and, in a very low voice, he added,
“unless ...” She looked at him with her lips parted, and he uttered the
one word: “Katya!” Her hand went up over her heart.

And he remembered how she had said that her mother always looked most
characteristic when she sat, with her hand over her heart, erect,
listening for the storms in the distance. And suddenly her voice
appeared to be one issuing from a figure of stone:

“Yes, that is it! She was indicated from the first; we ought to have
asked her from the first. That came into my head this afternoon.”

“We couldn’t have done better than we have,” he said. “We didn’t know
how. We haven’t been letting time slip.”

She nodded her head slowly.

“We _have_ been letting time slip. I knew it when I saw these two
over Dudley this afternoon. I lost suddenly all faith in Sir William.
It went out of me like water out of a glass, and I saw at once that we
had been letting time slip.”

Grimshaw said: “_Oh_!”

But with her little air of sad obstinacy she continued:

“If we hadn’t, we should have seen from the first that that man was
a cold fool. You see it the moment you look for it. Yes, get Miss
Lascarides! That’s what you’ve got to do.”

And when Robert Grimshaw held out his hand to her she raised her own
with a little gesture of abstention.

“Go to-night and ask Ellida if she will lend us her sister, to put us
all straight.”

Eating the end of his meal--which he had begun at the Langhams’--with
young Held alone in the dining-room, Robert Grimshaw said:

“We’re going to call Miss Lascarides to the rescue.”

The lean boy’s dark eyes lit up with a huge delight.

“How exactly the right thing!” he exclaimed. “I’ve heard of her. She’s
a great professional reputation. You wouldn’t think there was a whole
world of us talking about each other, but there is, and you couldn’t do
better. How did you come to hear of her?” And then his face fell. “Of
course it means my going out of it,” he said.

Robert Grimshaw let his commiserating glance rest on the young man’s
open countenance, over which every emotion passed as openly and as
visibly as gusts of wind pass over still waters. Suddenly an expression
of timid appeal came into the swarthy face.

“I should like you to let me say,” the boy brought out, “how much I
appreciate the way you’ve all treated me. I mean, you know, exactly
as an equal. For instance, _you_ talked to me just as if I were
anybody else. And Mrs. Leicester!”

“Well, you are like anybody else, aren’t you?” Robert Grimshaw said.

“Of course, too,” Held said, “it’ll be such a tremendous thing for her
to have a woman to confide in. She does need it. I can feel that she
needs it. Oh, as for me, of course I took a first in classics, but
what’s the good of that when you aren’t any mortal use in the world? I
might be somebody’s secretary, but I don’t know how those jobs are got.
I never had any influence. My father was only Vicar of Melkham. The
only thing I could do would be to be a Healer. I’ve so much faith that
I am sure I could do it with good conscience, whereas I don’t think
I’ve been doing this quite conscientiously. I mean I don’t think that I
ever believed I could be much good.”

Robert Grimshaw said: “Ah!”

“If there’d been anything to report to Sir William, I could have
reported it, for I am very observant, but there was nothing. There’s
been absolutely nothing. Or if there’d been any fear of violence--Sir
William always selects me for cases of intermittent violence.”

Again Robert Grimshaw said: “Ah!” and his eyes went over Mr. Held’s
form.

“You see,” Held continued, “I’m so immensely strong. I held the amateur
belt for wrestling for three years, Græco-Roman style. I expect I
could hold it still if I kept in training. But wasn’t I right when
I said that Mrs. Leicester had some sort of psychological revulsion
this afternoon?” He spoke the words pleadingly, and added in an almost
inaudible voice: “You don’t mind my asking? It isn’t an impertinence?
It means such an immense amount to me.”

“Yes, I think perhaps you’re right,” Grimshaw said. “Something of the
sort must have occurred.”

“I felt it,” Held continued, speaking very quickly; “I felt it
inwardly. Isn’t it wonderful, these waves that come out from people
one’s keenly sympathetic to? Quite suddenly it came; about an hour
after Sir William had gone. She was sitting on the arm of Mr.
Leicester’s chair and I felt it.”

“But wasn’t it because her face fell--something like that?” Robert
Grimshaw asked.

“Oh no, oh no,” Held said; “I had my back to her. I was looking out of
the window. To tell the truth, I can’t bear to look at her when she
sits like that beside him; it’s so ...”

A spasm of agony passed over Mr. Held’s face and he swallowed
painfully. And then he continued, his face lighting up:

“Why it’s such a tremendous thing to me is that it means I can go
forward; I can go on to be a Healer without any conscientious doubts
as to my capacities. If I felt this mentality so much, I can feel it
in other cases, so that really it means life and death to me; because
this sort of thing, if it’s very good study, doesn’t mean any more than
being a male nurse, so that I’ve gained immensely, even if I do go out
of the house. You don’t know what it’s meant to me to be in contact
with your two natures. My mentality has drawn its strength, light; I’m
a different person from what I was six weeks ago.”

“Oh, come!” Robert Grimshaw said.

“Oh, it’s true,” Mr. Held answered. “In the last place I was in I had
to have meals with the butler, and here you’ve been good, and I’ve
made this discovery, that my mentality _will_ synchronize with
another person’s if I’m much in sympathy with them.” And then he asked
anxiously: “Mrs. Leicester wasn’t very bad?”

“Oh no,” Robert Grimshaw answered, “it was only that she had come to
the resolution of calling in Miss Lascarides.”

“Now, I should have thought it was more than that,” Held said. “I was
almost certain that it was something very bitter and unpleasant. One of
those thoughts that seem suddenly to wreck one’s whole life.”

“Oh, I don’t think it was more than that,” Robert Grimshaw said; and
Mr. Held went on to declare at ecstatic lengths how splendid it would
be for Pauline to have Katya in the house, to have someone to confide
in, to unbosom herself to, to strengthen her mentality with, and
from whom to receive--he was sure she would receive it, since Miss
Lascarides was Mrs. Langham’s sister--to receive a deep and clinging
affection. Besides, Miss Lascarides having worked in the United States,
was certain to have imbibed some of Mrs. Eddy’s doctrine, so that,
except for Mr. Leicester’s state, it was, Mr. Held thought, going to
be an atmosphere of pure joy in the house. Mrs. Leicester so needed a
sister.

Robert Grimshaw sipped his coffee in a rather grim silence. “I wish
you’d get me the ‘ABC,’ or look up the trains for Brighton,” he said.




IV


“HERE comes mother and the bad man,” Kitty said from the top of her
donkey, and there sure enough to meet them, as they were returning
desultorily to lunch along the cliff-top, came Ellida Langham and
Robert Grimshaw. Ellida at the best of times was not much of a
pedestrian, and the donkey, for all it was large and very nearly white,
moved with an engrossed stubbornness that, even when she pulled it,
Katya found it difficult to change. On this occasion, however, she did
not even pull it, and the slowness of their mutual approach across the
green grass high up in the air had the effect of the coming together of
two combatant but reluctant forces.

“He’s a bad, bad man,” little Kitty said.

“And he’s a bad, bad man,” Katya answered her.

At her last parting it had been agreed between them that they parted
for good, or at least until Robert Grimshaw would give in to her
stipulation. He had said that this would not be until he had grown
very, very tired; and Katya felt it, like Mr. Held, in her bones that
Robert Grimshaw had not come now to submit to her. They approached,
however, in weather that was very bright, over the short turf beneath
dazzling seagulls overhead against the blue sky. And, Katya having
stood aside cool and decided in her grey dress, Ellida, dressed as she
always was in a loose black, flung herself upon the child. But, having
showered as many kisses and endearments as for the moment she needed,
she took the donkey by the bridle as a sign that she herself took
charge of that particular portion of the enterprise.

“You’ve got,” she said to her sister, “to go a walk with Toto. I’ll
take this thing home.”

Katya gave Robert a keen scrutiny whilst she said to Ellida:

“You’ll never get it home. It will pull the arms out of your body.”

“Well, I’ll admit,” Ellida said, a little disconsolately, “that I
never expected to turn into a donkey-boy, but”--and she suddenly grew
more brisk--“it’s got to be done. You remember that you’re only my
nursemaid.”

“That doesn’t,” Katya said amiably, “give you the right to dispose of
me when it comes to followers.”

“Oh, get along, you cantankerous cat.” Ellida laughed at her. “The
gentleman isn’t here as a follower. He’s heard I’ve given you notice,
and he’s taken up your character. He thinks you’ll do. He wants to
employ you.”

Katya uttered “Oh,” with minute displeasure, and a little colour came
into her clear cheeks. She turned her profile towards them, and against
the blue sky it was like an extraordinary cameo, so clear, so pale, the
dark eyelashes so exact, the jet-black hair receiving only in its coils
the reflection of the large, white, linen hat that Katya wore because
she was careful of her complexion and her eyes and her whole face had
that air of distant and inscrutable determination that goes with the
aspect of a divinity like Diana.

“In fact, it’s only a matter of terms,” Robert Grimshaw said, looking
away down the long slopes of the downs inland.

“Everything is always a matter of terms,” Katya said.

The white donkey was placidly browsing the short grass and the daisy
heads.

“Oh, come up,” Ellida said, and eventually the white beast responded
to her exertions. It wasn’t, however, until the donkey was well out of
earshot that Grimshaw broke the silence that Katya seemed determined
to maintain. He pointed with his stick to where--a dark patch of trees
dominated by a squarish, dark tower, in the very bottom of a fold in
the downs--a hamlet occupied the extreme distance.

“I want to walk to there,” he said.

“I’m not at all certain that I want to walk at all,” she answered, and
he retorted:

“Oh yes, you do. Look how the weathercock shines in the sun. You know
how, when we were children, we always wanted to walk to where the
weathercock shone, and there was always something to prevent it. Now
we’re grown up, we’re going to do it.”

“Ah, it’s different now,” she answered. “When we were children we
expected to find something under the shining weathercocks. Now there’s
nothing in the world that we can want to find. It seems as if we’d got
all that we’re ever going to get.”

“Still, you don’t know what we mightn’t find under there,” he said.

She looked straight into his clear olive-coloured face. She noted that
his eyes were dark and tired.

“Oh, poor dear!” she said to herself, and then she uttered aloud: “Now,
look here, Toto, it’s understood once and for all that I’m ready to
live with you to-day. But I won’t marry you. If I go with you now,
there’s to be no more talking about that.”

“Oh, that’s understood,” he said.

“Well, then,” she replied, and she unfolded her white sunshade, “let’s
go and see what we find beneath the weathercock and she put her hand on
his arm.”

They strolled slowly down the turf. She was used enough to his method
of waiting, as if for the psychological moment, to begin a conversation
of importance, and for quite a long way they talked gaily and
pleasantly of the little herbs of which, as they got farther inland,
they discovered their carpet to be composed--the little mints, the
little yellow blossoms, the tiny, silvery leaves like ferns--and the
quiet and the thrilling of the innumerable larks. The wind seemed to
move low down and cool about their feet.

And she said that he didn’t know what it meant to her to be back--just
in the quiet.

“Over there,” she said, “it did seem to be rather dreadful--rather
comfortless, and even a little useless. It wasn’t that they hadn’t
got the things. Why, there are bits in Philadelphia and bits round
Philadelphia--old bits and old families and old people. There are even
grass and flowers and shade. But somehow, what was dreadful, what made
it so lonely, was that they didn’t know what they were there for. It
was as if no one knew--what he was there for. I don’t know.”

She stopped for a minute.

“I don’t know,” she said--“I don’t know how to express it. Over here
things seem to fit in, if it’s only a history that they fit into. They
go on. But over there one went on patching up people--we patched them
up by the score, by the hundred. And then they went and did it all over
again, and it seemed as if we only did it for the purpose of letting
them go and do it all over again. It was as if instead of preparing
them for life we merely prepared them for new breakdowns.”

“Well, I suppose life _isn’t_ very well worth living over there?”
Grimshaw asked.

“Oh, it isn’t the life,” she said. “The _life’s_ worth
living--more worth living than it is here.... But there’s something
more than mere life. There’s--you might call it the overtone of
life--the something that’s more than the mere living. It’s the what
gives softness to our existence that they haven’t got. It’s the ...
That’s it! It’s knowing one’s place; it’s feeling that one’s part of a
tradition, a link in the chain. And oh ...” she burst out, “I didn’t
want to talk about it. But it used to come over me like a fearful
doubt--the thought that I, too, might be growing into a creature
without a place. That’s why it’s heaven to be back,” she ended. She
looked down the valley with her eyes half closed, she leant a little on
his arm. “It’s heaven, heaven!” she repeated in a whisper.

“You were afraid,” he said, “that we shouldn’t keep a place for
you--Ellida, and I, and all of us?”

“Perhaps that was all it was,” she dropped her voice to say. He pressed
with his arm her hand against his heart.

“Oh,” he said, “it isn’t only the old place we want you to go into.
There’s a new one. You’ve heard that I’ve been taking up your
character?”

“Ah,” she said; and again she was on the alert in an instant. “I’m
to have a situation with you? Who’s the invalid? Peter?” The little
dog with the flapping ears was running wide on the turf, scenting the
unaccustomed grasses.

“Oh, Peter’s as near speaking as he can ever get,” Grimshaw said.

Katya laughed.

“That would be a solution,” she said, “if you took me on as Peter’s
nurse. But who’s your dumb child now? I suppose it’s your friend ...
ah! ... Dudley Leicester.”

“You remember,” Grimshaw said, “you used always to say he was like
Peter.”

“No; it was you I used to say were like Peter. W ell, what’s the matter
with Dudley Leicester? ... at least. No. Don’t tell me. I’ve heard a
good deal from Ellida. She’s gone clean mad about his wife.”

“Yes; she’s mad enough about Pauline,” Grimshaw said, “and so would you
be.”

“I dare say,” she answered. “She seems brave. That’s always a good
deal.”

“Oh, if you want braveness!” Grimshaw said. “But how can you consider
his case if you won’t hear about him?”

“I’ve had _one_ version,” she said. “I don’t want two. It would
obscure my view. What we know is that he sits about speechless, and
that he asks strangers in the street a question about a telephone.
That’s right, isn’t it?”

“What an admirable professional manner you’ve got!” Grimshaw said; and
he disengaged her hand from his arm to look better at her. “It’s quite
right about poor Dudley.”

“Well,” she said, “don’t be silly for a moment. This is my work in
life--you know you don’t look over-well yourself--but answer me one
question. I’m content to take Ellida’s version about him, because she
can’t influence my views. _You_ might. And one wants to look only
from personal observation. But ...” She stretched out her hand and felt
his pulse for a light minute.

“You aren’t well,” she said. “No, I don’t want to look at your tongue.
Here, take off your cap;” and suddenly she ran her fingers smoothly
and firmly over his temples, so that they seemed to explore deep
places, cool and restful. “That soothes you, doesn’t it?” she said.
“_That’s_ how I make my bread. But take care, dear thing, or it’ll
be you that I shall be nursing next.”

“It lies with you to cure it,” he answered.

She uttered a painful “_Oh_!” and looked down the valley between
her gloved fingers. When she took her hands down from her face, she
said:

“Look here! That’s not fair. You promised not to.”

He answered: “But how can I help it? How can I help it?”

She seemed to make her head grow rigid.

“One thing at a time, then,” she said. “You know everything. What
happened to him at the telephone?” And when he said that someone--when
he was in a place where he ought not to have been--had recognized his
voice, she said: “Oh!” and then again, “_Oh_! that explains.”

Grimshaw looked at her, his dark eyes imploring.

“It can be cured?” he said.

“It ought to be,” she answered. “It depends. I’ll look at him.”

“Oh, you _must_,” he answered.

“Well, I will,” she retorted. “But, you understand, I must be paid my
fee.”

“Oh,” he said, “don’t rub it in just now.” “Well, you rubbed it in just
now,” she mocked him. “You tried to get round my sympathies. I’ve got
to harden myself to get back to where I was. You know you shook me. But
I’m a lonely woman. My work’s all I’ve got.”

“Katya!” he said. “You know your half of your father’s money is waiting
for you. I’ve not spent a penny of it.”

“I know you’re a dear,” she said, “but it doesn’t alter matters. I
won’t take money from a man who won’t make a sacrifice for me.”

“Ellida took her share,” he said.

“Ellida’s Ellida,” she answered. “She’s a darling, but she’s not me.
If you’d take the steps you might, you could have me, and I’d have
father’s money. But that’s all there is to it. I’ll do all I can for
Dudley Leicester. Don’t let’s talk about the other thing.”

They came down to the hard road over the bank.

“Now we shall see what’s under the weathercock,” she said.




V

IT was as if in the churchyard, amongst the old and slanting tombs, in
the sunlight and in the extended fingers of the yews, there was the
peace of God. In the highroad, as it passed through the little hamlet,
not a single person stirred. The cottage doors stood open, and as they
had passed they could hear even the ticking of the clocks. The dust on
the highroad was stamped into little patterns by the feet of a flock of
sheep that, from the hill above, they had seen progressing slowly at a
great distance.

“The peace of God,” Robert Grimshaw said. They were sitting in the
small plastered porch of the little old church.

“‘The peace of God, which passeth all understanding....’ I’ve always
thought that those words, coming where they do, are the most beautiful
thing in any rite. It’s like ...” He seemed to be about to enter on a
long train of thought, but suddenly he said, “Oh, my dear,” and he laid
his head on her shoulder, his eyes closed, and the lines of his face
drooping. They sat silent for a long time, and slowly into hers there
came an expression of a deep and restful tenderness, a minute softening
of all the lines and angles of his chiselled countenance; and at last
he said, very low: “Oh, you must end it!” and she answered in an echo
of his tone: “No, no. Don’t ask me. It isn’t fair;” and she knew that
if she looked at his tired face again, or if again his voice sounded so
weary, that she would surrender to his terms.

He answered: “Oh, I’m not asking that. I promised that I wouldn’t, and
I’m not. It’s the other thing that you must end. You don’t know what it
means to me.”

She said: “What?” with an expression of bewilderment, a queer numb
expression, and whilst he brought out in slow and rather broken
phrases, “It’s an unending strain ... And I feel I am responsible ...
It goes on night and day ... I can’t sleep ... I can’t eat ... I have
got the conviction that suddenly he might grow violent and murder....”
Her face was hardening all the while. It grew whiter and her eyes
darkened.

“You’re talking of Dudley Leicester?” she said, and slowly she removed
her arm from beneath his hand. She stood up in front of him, clear and
cool in her grey dress, and he recovered his mastery of himself.

“But, of course,” he went on, “that’s only a sort of nightmare, and
you’re going to put an end to it. If we start back now you could see
him to-night.”

She put her hands behind her back, and said with a distinct and clear
enunciation: “I am not going to.” He looked at her without much
comprehension.

“Well, to-morrow, then. Next week. Soon?”

“I am not going to at all,” she brought out still more hardly. “Not
to-day. Not this week. Not ever.” And before his bewilderment she began
to speak with a passionate scorn: “This is what I was to discover
beneath the weathercock! Do you consider what a ridiculous figure you
out? You bring me here to talk about that man. What’s he to you, or you
to him? Why should you maunder and moon and worry about him?”

“But ...” Robert Grimshaw said, and she burst into a hard laugh.

“No wonder you can’t give in to me if you’ve got to be thinking of him
all the time. Well, put it how you will, I have done with him, and
I’ve done with you. Go your own idiotic ways together. I’ve done with
you.” And with her hands stretched down in front of her she snapped the
handle of her parasol, her face drawn and white. She looked down at the
two pieces contemptuously, and threw them against the iron-bolted, oak
church door. “That’s an end of it,” she said.

Grimshaw looked up at her, with his jaw dropping in amazement.

“But you’re jealous!” he said.

She kept herself calm for a minute longer.

“I’m sorry,” she said--“I’m sorry for his poor little wife. I’m sorry
for Ellida, who wants him cured, but it’s their fault for having to do
with such a soft, meddlesome creature as you.” And then suddenly she
burst out into a full torrent: “Jealous!” she said. “Yes, I’m jealous.
Is that news to you? It isn’t to me. That’s the secret of the whole
thing, if you come to think of it. Now that it’s all over between
us there’s no reason why you shouldn’t know it. All my life you’ve
tortured me. When I was a tiny child it was the same. I wanted you
altogether, body and soul, and you had always someone like that, that
you took an interest in; that you were always trying to get _me_
to take an interest in. Just you think the matter out. It’ll make you
understand a good many things.” She broke off, and then she began
again: “Jealous? Yes, if it’s jealousy to want a woman’s right--the
whole of a man altogether.” She closed her eyes and stood for a moment
shuddering. “Good-bye,” she said; and with an extreme stiffness she
went down the short path. As she turned to go through the gate she
called back: “You’d better try Morley Bishop.”

Grimshaw rose to his feet as if to follow her, but an extreme weariness
had overcome him. He picked up the pieces of her parasol, and with a
slow and halting gait went along the dusty road towards the village inn.

A little later he took from the nearest station the train up to London,
but the intolerable solitude of the slow journey, the thought of
Pauline’s despair, the whole weight of depression, of circumstance,
made him, on arriving at London Bridge, get out and cross the platform
to the down-train time-tables. He was going to return to Brighton.


Ellida was sitting in the hotel room about eleven, reading a novel that
concerned itself with the Court life of a country called “Nolhynia.”
She looked up at Robert Grimshaw, and said:

“Well, what have you two been up to?”

“Hasn’t Katya told you?”

Ellida, luxuriating at last in the sole possession of her little Kitty,
who by now prattled distractingly; luxuriating, too, in the possession
of many solid hours of a night of peace, stolen unexpectedly and
unavoidably from the duties of a London career, was really and paganly
sprawling in a very deep chair.

“No,” she said. “Katya hasn’t told me anything. Where is Katya? I
thought you’d decided to go off together at last, and leave poor little
Pauline to do the best she could;” and she held out, without moving
more than her hand, a pink telegram form which bore the words:

“Don’t worry about me. Am quite all right. See that Kitty’s milk is
properly metchnikoffed.”

“It was sent from Victoria,” she said, “so of _course_ I thought
you’d been and gone and done it. I didn’t know whether to be glad or
sorry, but I think I was mostly glad.” She looked up at his anxious
face curiously. “Haven’t you gone and done it?” she said. “You don’t
mean to say you’ve split again?”

“We’ve split again,” he answered. “Worse than ever before.” And he
added anxiously: “You don’t think she’ll have been doing anything rash?”

“Anything rash!” she mocked him pleasantly. “She’s never in her life
done anything else. But if you mean gone under a motor-bus, I can tell
you this, Mr. Toto, she too jolly well means to have you to do anything
of that sort. What’s the matter now?”

He related as carefully as he could, and then she said: “For a couple
of darlings you are the most extraordinary creatures on earth. Katya’s
Katya, of course; but why in Heaven’s name you can’t be reasonable it
passes me to understand.”

“Reasonable!” Grimshaw exclaimed.

“Well,” Ellida answered, “you don’t know Katya as I do. You think, I
dare say, that she’s a cool, manlike sort of chap. As a matter of fact,
she’s a mere bundle of nerves and insane obstinacies. I don’t mean to
say that she’s not adorable. She’s just the most feminine thing in the
world, but what you ought to do is perfectly plain. You ought to bring
her to her knees. If you won’t give in to her--it would be the easiest
thing to do--it would be just as easy to bring her to her knees.”

“It would?” Grimshaw asked.

“Yes,” she said, “easy, but I dare say a bit of a bore. You go off with
some other woman, and she’ll be after you with hatchets and knives in
ten seconds after she hears the news. That’s Katya. It’s Kitty, too,
and I dare say it would be me if I ever had anything in the world to
contrarify me.”

“Oh, I’m tired out,” he answered. “I told you some time ago that if I
grew very, very tired I should give in to her. Well, I’ve come down to
tell her that, if she’ll take on Dudley, she can take me on, too, on
her own terms.”

Ellida looked up at him with her quick and birdlike eyes.

“Well, look here, Mr. Toto,” she said, “if you’re going to do that,
you’d better get it told to her quick. If you don’t catch her on the
hop before she’s got time to harden into it as an obstinacy, you’ll
find that she’ll have made it a rule of life never to speak to you
again; and then there’ll be nothing for it but you’re carrying on
with--oh, say Etta Hudson--until Katya gets to the daggers and knives
stage.”

“But where is she?” Grimshaw asked.

“Oh, well, you’re a man who knows everything,” she answered. “I expect
she’s gone to one of the six or seven of her patients that are always
clamouring for her. You’d better hurry to find her, or she’ll be
off touring round the world before you know where you are.... I’ve
always thought,” she continued, “that you handled her wrongly at the
beginning. If the moment she’d begun that nonsense, you’d taken a
stick to her, or dragged her off to a registry office, or contrived
to pretend to be harsh and brutal, she’d have given in right at once;
but she got the cranky idea into her head, and now it’s hardened into
sheer pride. I don’t believe that she really wanted it then, after the
first day or two. She only wanted to bring you to your knees. If you
had given in then, she’d have backed out of it at the last moment, and
you’d have had St. George’s and orange-blossoms, and ‘The Voice that
breathed o’er Eden’ all complete.”

“Well, I can’t bother about it any longer,” Grimshaw said. “I’m done. I
give in.”

“Good old Toto,” Ellida said. And then she dropped her voice to say: “I
don’t know that it’s the sort of thing that a sister ought to encourage
a sister doing, but if you managed not to let anyone know--and that’s
easy enough, considering how you’ve set everybody talking about your
quarrels. You can just meet her at Athens, and then come back and
say you’ve made it up suddenly, and got married at the Consulate at
Scutari or Trebizond, or some old place where there isn’t a Consulate,
and nobody goes to--if nobody knows about it, I don’t see that I need
bother much.” She looked up at him and continued: “I suppose you’ll
think I’m immoral or whatever it is; but, after all, there was mother,
who was really the best woman in the world. Of course I know you think
of the future, but when everything’s said and done, I’m in the same
position that your children will be, and it doesn’t worry me very much.
It doesn’t worry Katya either, though she likes to pretend it does.”

“Oh, I’m not thinking of anything at all,” Grimshaw answered. “I just
give in. I just want the ... the peace of God.”

She looked up at him with her eyes slightly distended and wondering.

“Are you,” she said, “quite sure that you will get it? Katya is a
dear, of course, but she’s the determination of a tiger; she has been
play-acting from the first, and she has meant to have you since you
were in your cradles together. But she’s meant to have you humbled and
submissive, and tied utterly hand and foot. I don’t believe she ever
meant not to marry you. I don’t believe she means it now, but she means
to make you give in to her before she marries you. She thinks it will
be the final proof of your passion for her.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Robert Grimshaw answered. “I don’t know and I
don’t care. What I want is to have things settled. What does it matter
whether it’s for life or death?”

“And Pauline Leicester?” Mrs. Langham asked.

Robert Grimshaw made a little motion with his thumb and fingers, as if
he were crumbing between them a little piece of dried earth.




VI


IN the drawing-room with the blue curtains Mr. Held was saying to
Pauline Leicester: “Yes, it’s just gone ten. It’s too late for a
telegram, but I’m sure you’ll get a message somehow to say she’s
coming. After all, he can telephone from Brighton.”

“He mayn’t have succeeded,” Pauline said. “Oh, I’m sure he’s
succeeded,” Mr. Held answered. “I feel it in my bones.”

It was now the thirtieth or fortieth time that since eight o’clock he
had uttered some such words, and he was going on to say: “He and she
are great friends, aren’t they?” when Saunders opened the door to say
that a lady wished to speak to Mrs. Leicester.

“Oh, they are great friends,” Pauline answered Mr. Held. “Miss
Lascarides is his cousin”; and then to Saunders: “Who is it?”

Saunders answered that he didn’t know the lady, but that she appeared
to be a lady.

“What’s she like?” Pauline said.

The butler answered that she was very tall, very dark, and, if he might
say so, rather imperious.

Pauline’s mouth opened a little. “It’s not,” she said--“it’s not Lady
Hudson?”

“Oh, it isn’t Lady Hudson, mum. I know Lady Hudson very well by sight.
She goes past the house every day with a borzoi.”


In the dining-room, lit by a solitary light on the chimney-piece,
Pauline saw a lady--very tall, very dark, and very cool and collected.
They looked at each other for the shadow of a moment with the odd and
veiled hostility that mysterious woman bestows upon her fellow-mystery.

“You’re Pauline Leicester?” the stranger said. “You don’t know who I
am?”

“We’ve never met, I think,” Pauline answered.

“And you’ve never seen a photograph?”

“A photograph?” Pauline said. “No; I don’t think I’ve seen a
photograph.”

“Ah, you wouldn’t have a photograph of me that’s not a good many years’
old. It was a good deal before your time.”

With her head full of the possibilities of her husband’s past, for she
couldn’t tell that there mightn’t have been another, Pauline said, with
her brave distinctness:

“Are you, perhaps, the person who rang up 4,259 Mayfair? If you are ...”

The stranger’s rather regal eyes opened slightly. She was leaning one
arm on the chimney-piece and looking over her shoulder, but at that she
turned and held out both her hands.

“Oh, my dear,” she said, “it’s perfectly true what he said. You’re the
bravest woman in the world, and I’m Katya Lascarides.”

With the light full upon her face, Pauline Leicester hardly stirred.

“You’ve heard all about me,” she said, with a touch of sadness in her
voice, “from Robert Grimshaw?”

“No, from Ellida,” Katya answered, “and I’ve seen your photograph. She
carries it about with her.”

Pauline Leicester said, “Ah!” very slowly. And then, “Yes; Ellida’s
very fond of me. She’s very good to me.”

“My dear,” Katya said, “Ellida’s everything in the matter. At any
rate, if I’m going to do you any good, it’s she that’s got me here. I
shouldn’t have done it for Robert Grimshaw.”

Pauline turned slightly pale.

“You haven’t quarrelled with Robert?” she said. “I should be so sorry.”

“My dear,” Katya answered, “never mention his name to me again. It’s
only for you I’m here, because what Ellida told me has made me like
you;” and then she asked to see the patient.


Dudley Leicester, got into evening dress as he was by Saunders and
Mr. Held every evening, sat, blond and healthy to all seeming, sunk
in the eternal arm-chair, his fingers beating an eternal tattoo, his
eyes fixed upon vacancy. His appearance was so exactly natural that it
was impossible to believe he was in any “condition” at all. It was so
impossible to believe it that when, with a precision that seemed to add
many years to her age, Katya Lascarides approached, and, bending over
him, touched with the tips of her fingers little and definite points on
his temples and brows, touching them and retouching them as if she were
fingering a rounded wind-instrument, and that, when she asked: “Doesn’t
that make your head feel better?” it seemed merely normal that his
right hand should come up from the ceaseless drumming on the arm of the
chair to touch her wrist, and that plaintively his voice should say:
“Much better; oh, much better!”

And Pauline and Mr. Held said simultaneously: “He isn’t ...”

“Oh, he isn’t cured,” Katya said. “This is only a part of the process.
It’s to get him to like me, to make him have confidence in me, so that
I can get to know something about him. Now, go away. I can’t give you
any verdict till I’ve studied him.”




PART V




I


IN the intervals of running from hotel to hotel--for Robert Grimshaw
had taken it for granted that Ellida was right, and that Katya had gone
either to the old hotel where she had stayed with Mrs. Van Husum, and
where they knew she had left the heavier part of her belongings--Robert
Grimshaw looked in to tell Pauline that he hadn’t yet been able to fix
things up with Katya Lascarides, but that he was certainly going to
do so, and would fetch her along that afternoon. In himself he felt
some doubt of how he was going to find Katya. At the Norfolk Street
hotel he had heard that she had called in for two or three minutes the
night before in order to change her clothes--he remembered that she was
wearing her light grey dress and a linen sun-hat--and that then she had
gone out, saying that she was going to a patient’s, and might or might
not come back.

“This afternoon,” he repeated, “I’ll bring her along.”

Pauline looked at his face attentively.

“Don’t you know where she is?” she said incredulously, and then she
added, as if with a sudden desolation: “Have you quarrelled as much as
all that?”

“How did you know I don’t know where she is?” Grimshaw answered
swiftly. “She hasn’t been attacking you?”

Her little hands fell slowly open at her sides; then she rested one of
them upon the white cloth that was just being laid for lunch.

The horn of an automobile sounded rather gently outside, and the wheels
of a butcher’s cart rattled past.

“Oh, Robert,” she said suddenly, “it wasn’t about me you quarrelled?
Don’t you understand she’s here in the house now? That was Sir William
Wells who just left.”

“She hasn’t been attacking you?” Grimshaw persisted.

“Oh, she wouldn’t, you know,” Pauline answered. “She isn’t that sort.
It’s you she would attack if she attacked anybody.”

“Oh, well, yes,” Robert Grimshaw answered. “It was about you we
quarrelled--about you and Dudley, about the household: it occupies too
much of my attention. She wants me altogether.”

“Then what’s she here for?” Pauline said.

“I don’t know,” Grimshaw said. “Perhaps because she’s sorry for you.”

“Sorry for me!” Pauline said, “because I care.... But then she ... Oh,
where do we stand?”

“What has she done?” Robert Grimshaw said. “What does she say?”

“About you?” Pauline said.

“No, no--about the case?”

“Oh,” Pauline said, “she says that if we can only find out who it was
rang up that number it would be quite likely that we could cure him.”

Grimshaw suddenly sat down.

“That means ...” he said, and then he stopped.

Pauline said: “What? I couldn’t bear to cause her any unhappiness.”

“Oh,” Robert Grimshaw answered, “is that the way to talk in our day
and--and--and our class? We don’t take things like that.”

“Oh, my dear,” she said painfully, “how are we taking this?” Then she
added: “And in any case Katya isn’t of our day or our class.”

She came near, and stood over him, looking down.

“Robert,” she said gravely, “who is of our day and our class? Are you?
Or am I? Why are your hands shaking like that, or why did I just now
call you ‘my dear’? We’ve got to face the fact that I called you ‘my
dear.’ Then, don’t you see, you can’t be of our day and our class. And
as for me, wasn’t it really because Dudley wasn’t faithful to me that
I’ve let myself slide near you? I haven’t made a scandal or any outcry
about Dudley Leicester. That’s our day and that’s our class. But look
at all the difference it’s made in our personal relations! Look at the
misery of it all! That’s it. We can make a day and a class and rules
for them, but we can’t keep any of the rules except just the gross ones
like not making scandals.”

“Then, what Katya’s here for,” Robert Grimshaw said, “is to cure
Dudley. She’s a most wonderful sense, and she knows that the only way
to have me altogether is to cure him.”

“Oh, don’t put it as low down as that,” Pauline said. “Just a little
time ago you said that it was because she was sorry for me.”

“Yes, yes,” Grimshaw answered eagerly; “that’s it; that’s the motive.
But it doesn’t hinder the result from being that, when Dudley’s cured,
we all fly as far apart as the poles.”

“Ah,” she said slowly, and she looked at him with the straight,
remorseless glance and spoke with the little, cold expressionless voice
that made him think of her for the rest of his life as if she were the
unpitying angel that barred for our first parents the return into Eden,
“you see that at least! That is where we all are--flying as far apart
as the poles.”

Grimshaw suddenly extended both his hands in a gesture of mute agony,
but she drew back both her own.

“That again,” she said, “is our day and our class. And that’s the best
that’s to be said for us. We haven’t learned wisdom: we’ve only learned
how to behave. We cannot avoid tragedies.”

She paused and repeated with a deeper note of passion than he had ever
heard her allow herself:

“Tragedies! Yes, in our day and in our class we don’t allow ourselves
easy things like daggers and poison-bowls. It’s all more difficult.
It’s all more difficult because it goes on and goes on. We think we’ve
made it easier because we’ve slackened old ties. You’re in and out of
the house all day long, and I can go around with you everywhere. But
just because we’ve slackened the old ties, just because marriage is
a weaker thing than it used to be--in our day and in our class”--she
repeated the words with deep bitterness and looked unflinchingly into
his eyes--“we’ve strengthened so immensely the other kind of ties. If
you’d been married to Miss Lascarides you’d probably not have been
faithful to her. As it is, just because your honour’s involved you find
yourself tied to her as no monk ever was by his vow.”

She looked down at her feet and then again at his eyes, and in her
glance there was a cold stream of accusation that appeared incredible,
coming from a creature so small, so fragile, and so reserved. Grimshaw
stood with his head hanging forward upon his chest: the scene seemed
to move with an intolerable slowness, and to him her attitude of
detachment was unspeakably sad. It was as if she spoke from a great
distance--as if she were a ghost fading away into dimness. He could not
again raise his hands towards her: he could utter no endearments: her
gesture of abnegation had been too absolute and too determined. With
her eyes full upon him she said:

“You do not love Katya Lascarides: you are as cold to her as a stone.
You love me, and you have ruined all our lives. But it doesn’t end, it
goes on. We fly as far asunder as the poles, and it goes on for good.”

She stopped as suddenly as she had begun to speak, and what she had
said was so true, and the sudden revelation of what burned beneath the
surface of a creature so small and apparently so cold--the touch of
fierce hunger in her voice, of pained resentment in her eyes--these
things so overwhelmed Robert Grimshaw that for a long time, still he
remained silent. Then suddenly he said:

“Yes; by God, it’s true what you say! I told Ellida long ago that my
business in life was to wait for Katya and to see that you had a good
time.” He paused, and then added quickly: “I’ve lived to see you in
hell, and I’ve waited for Katya till”--he moved one of his hands in a
gesture of despair--“till all the fire’s burned out,” he added suddenly.

“So that now,” she retorted with a little bitter humour, “what you’ve
got to do is to give Katya a good time and go on waiting for me.”

“Till when?” he said with a sudden hot eagerness.

“Oh,” she said, “till all the ships that ever sailed come home; till
all the wild-oats that were ever sown are reaped; till the sun sets in
the east and the ice on the poles is all melted away. If you were the
only man in all the world, my dear, I would never look at you again.”

Grimshaw looked at the ground and muttered aimlessly:

“What’s to be done? What’s to be done?”

He went on repeating this like a man stupified beyond the power of
speech and thought, until at last it was as if a minute change of light
passed across the figure of Pauline Leicester--as if the softness faded
out of her face, her colour and her voice, as if, having for that short
interval revealed the depths of her being, she had closed in again,
finally and irrevocably. So that it was with a sort of ironic and
business-like crispness that she said:

“All that’s to be done is the one thing that you’ve got to do.”

“And that?” Robert Grimshaw asked.

“That is to find the man who rang up that number. You’ve got to do that
because you know all about these things.”

“I?” Robert Grimshaw said desolately. “Oh yes, I know all about these
things.”

“You know,” Pauline continued, “she’s very forcible, your Katya. You
should have seen how she spoke to Sir William Wells, until at last he
positively roared with fury, and yet she hadn’t said a single word
except, in the most respectful manner in the world, ‘Wouldn’t it have
been best the very first to discover who the man on the telephone was?”

“How did she know about the man on the telephone?” Grimshaw said. “You
didn’t. Sir William told me not to tell you.”

“Oh, Sir William!” she said, with the first contempt that he had ever
heard in her voice. “He didn’t want anybody to know anything. And when
Katya told him that over there they always attempt to cure a shock of
that sort by a shock almost exactly similar, he simply roared out:
‘Theories! theories! theories!’ That was his motor that went just now.”

They were both silent for a long time, and then suddenly Robert
Grimshaw said:

“It was I that rang up 4,259 Mayfair.”

Pauline only answered: “Ah!”


And looking straight at the carpet in front of him, Robert Grimshaw
remembered the March night that had ever since weighed so heavily on
them all. He had dined alone at his club. He had sat talking to three
elderly men, and, following his custom, at a quarter past eleven he
had set out to walk up Piccadilly and round the acute angle of Regent
Street. Usually he walked down Oxford Street, down Park Lane; and so,
having taken his breath of air and circumnavigated, as it were, the
little island of wealth that those four streets encompass, he would lay
himself tranquilly in his white bed, and with Peter on a chair beside
his feet, he would fall asleep. But on that night, whilst he walked
slowly, his stick behind his back, he had been almost thrown down by
Etta Stackpole, who appeared to fall right under his feet, and she was
followed by the tall form of Dudley Leicester, whose face Grimshaw
recognized as he looked up to pay the cabman. Having, as one does on
the occasion of such encounters, with a military precision and an
extreme swiftness turned on his heels--having turned indeed so swiftly
that his stick, which was behind his back, swung out centrifugally and
lightly struck Etta Stackpole’s skirt, he proceeded to walk home in
a direction the reverse of his ordinary one. And at first he thought
absolutely nothing at all. The night was cold and brilliant, and he
peeped, as was his wont, curiously and swiftly into the faces of the
passers-by. Just about abreast of Burlington House he ejaculated:
“That sly cat!” as if he were lost in surprised admiration for Dudley
Leicester’s enterprise. But opposite the Ritz he began to shiver. “I
must have taken a chill,” he said, but actually there had come into
his mind the thought--the thought that Etta Stackpole afterwards so
furiously upbraided him for--that Dudley Leicester must have been
carrying on a long intrigue with Etta Stackpole. “And I’ve married
Pauline to that scoundrel!” he muttered, for it seemed to him that
Dudley Leicester must have been a scoundrel, if he could so play fast
and loose, if he could do it so skilfully as to take in himself, whilst
appearing so open about it.

And then Grimshaw shrugged his shoulders: “Well, it’s no business of
mine,” he said.

He quickened his pace, and walked home to bed; but he was utterly
unable to sleep.

Lying in his white bed, the sheets up to his chin, his face dark in the
blaze of light, from above his head--the only dark object, indeed, in
a room that was all monastically white--his tongue was so dry that he
was unable to moisten his lips with it. He lay perfectly still, gazing
at Peter’s silver collar that, taken off for the night, hung from
the hook on the back of the white door. His lips muttered fragments
of words with which his mind had nothing to do. They bubbled up from
within him as if from the depths of his soul, and at that moment Robert
Grimshaw knew himself. He was revealed to himself for the first time
by words over which he had no control. In this agony and this prickly
sweat the traditions--traditions that are so infectious--of his English
public-school training, of his all-smooth and suppressed contacts in
English social life, all the easy amenities and all the facile sense of
honour that is adapted only to the life of no strain, of no passions;
all these habits Were gone at this touch of torture. And it was of
this intolerably long anguish that he had been thinking when he had
said to Etta Stackpole that in actual truth he was only a Dago. For
Robert Grimshaw, if he was a man of many knowledges, was a man of no
experiences at all, since his connection with Katya Lascarides, her
refusal of him, her shudderings at him, had been so out of the ordinary
nature of things that he couldn’t make any generalizations from them at
all. When he had practically forced Dudley Leicester upon Pauline, he
really had believed that you can marry a woman you love to your best
friend without enduring all the tortures of jealousy. This sort of
marriage of convenience that it was, was, he knew, the sort of thing
that in their sort of life was frequent and successful enough, and
having been trained in the English code of manners never to express any
emotion at all, he had forgotten that he possessed emotions. Now he was
up against it.

He was frightfully up against it. Till now, at least, he had been able
to imagine that Dudley Leicester had at least a devouring passion for,
a quenchless thirst to protect, his wife. It had been a passion so
great and commencing so early that Grimshaw could claim really only
half the credit of having made the match. Indeed, his efforts had been
limited to such influence as he had been able to bring to bear upon
Pauline’s mother, to rather long conversations in which he had pointed
out how precarious, Mrs. Lucas being dead, would be Pauline’s lot in
life. And he had told her at last that he himself was irretrievably
pledged, both by honour and by passion, to Katya Lascarides. It was on
the subsequent day that Pauline had accepted her dogged adorer.

His passion for Katya Lascarides! He hadn’t till that moment had any
doubt about it. But by then he knew it was gone; it was dead, and
in place of a passion he felt only remorse. And his longing to be
perpetually with Pauline Leicester--as he had told Ellida Langham--to
watch her going through all her life with her perpetual tender smile,
dancing, as it were, a gentle and infantile measure; this, too, he
couldn’t doubt. Acute waves of emotion went through him at the thought
of her--waves of emotion so acute that they communicated themselves
to his physical being, so that it was as if the thought of Katya
Lascarides stabbed his heart, whilst the thought of Pauline Leicester
made his hands toss beneath the sheets. For, looking at the matter
formally, and, as he thought, dispassionately, it had seemed to him
that his plain duty was to wait for Katya Lascarides, and to give
Pauline as good a time as he could. That Pauline would have this with
Dudley Leicester he hadn’t had till the moment of the meeting in Regent
Street the ghost of a doubt, but now ...

He said: “Good God!” for he was thinking that only the Deity--if even
He--could achieve the impossible, could undo what was done, could
let him watch over Pauline, which was the extent of the possession
of her that he thought he desired, and wait for Katya, which also
was, perhaps, all that he had ever desired to do. The intolerable
hours ticked on. The light shone down on him beside the bed. At the
foot Peter slept, coiled up and motionless. At the head the telephone
instrument, like a gleaming metal flower, with its nickel corolla and
black bell, shone with reflected light. He was accustomed on mornings
when he felt he needed a rest to talk to his friends from time to
time, and suddenly his whole body stirred in bed. The whites of his
eyes gleamed below the dark irises, his white teeth showed, and as he
clasped the instrument to him he appeared, as it were, a Shylock who
clutched to his breast his knife and demanded of the universe his right
to the peace of mind that knowledge at least was to give him.

He must know; if he was to defend Pauline, to watch over her, to
brood over her, to protect her, he must know what was going on. This
passionate desire swept over him like a flood. There remained nothing
else in the world. He rang up the hotel which, tall, white, and cold,
rises close by where he had seen Etta Stackpole spring from the cab. He
rang up several houses known to him, and, finally, with a sort of panic
in his eyes he asked for Lady Hudson’s number. The little dog, aroused
by his motions and his voice, leapt on to the bed, and pattering up,
gazed wistfully at his face. He reached out his tongue to afford what
consolation he could to the master, whom he knew to be perturbed,
grieved, and in need of consolation, and just before the tinny sound
of a voice reached Grimshaw’s ears Grimshaw said, his lips close to
the mouthpiece, “Get down.” And when, after he had uttered the words,
“Isn’t that Dudley Leicester speaking?” there was the click of the
instrument being rung off, Robert Grimshaw said to himself grimly, “At
any rate, they’ll know who it was that rung them up.”

But Dudley Leicester hadn’t known; he was too stupid, and the tinny
sound of the instrument had destroyed the resemblance of any human
voice.


Thus, sitting before Pauline Leicester in her drawing-room, did Robert
Grimshaw review his impressions. And, looking back on the whole affair,
it seemed to present himself to him in those terms of strong light, of
the unreal sound of voices on the telephone, and of pain, of unceasing
pain that had never “let up” at any rate from the moment when, having
come up from the country with Katya’s kisses still upon his lips,
he had found Pauline in his dining-room, and had heard that Dudley
Leicester didn’t know.

He remained seated, staring, brooding at the carpet just before
Pauline’s feet, and suddenly she said: “Oh, Robert, what did you
_do_ it for?”

He rose up suddenly and stood over her, and when he held both her small
hands between his own, “You’d better,” he said--“it’ll be better for
both you and me--put upon it the construction that shows the deepest
concern for you.”

And suddenly from behind their backs came the voice of Katya Lascarides.

“Well,” she said, “Robert knows everything. Who is the man that rang up
4,259 Mayfair?”

Robert Grimshaw hung his head for a moment, and then:

“I did,” he said.

Katya only answered, “Ah!” Then, very slowly, she came over and put one
hand on Pauline’s shoulder. “Oh, you poor dear,” she exclaimed, and
then to Robert: “Then you’d better come and tell him so. I’ll stake my
new hat to my professional reputation that it’ll put him on to his legs
at once.”

And with an air of taking him finally under her wing, she conducted him
down the passage to Dudley Leicester’s room.


In the dining-room Pauline stood for a long time looking down at her
fingers that rested upon the tablecloth. The air was full of little
noises--the clitter of milk-cans, the monotonous sound of water
pulsing continuously from the mains, the voices of two nurses as they
wheeled their charges home from the Park. The door-bell rang, but no
one disturbed her. With the light falling on her hair, absolutely
motionless, she looked down at her fingers on the white cloth and
smiled faintly.




II


IN the long, dark room where Dudley Leicester still sprawled in his
deep chair, Katya stopped Robert Grimshaw near the door.

“I’ll ask him to ask you his question,” she said, “and you’ll answer it
in as loud a voice as you can. That’ll cure him. You’ll see. I don’t
suppose you expected to see me here.”

“I didn’t expect it,” he answered, “but I know why you have come.”

“Well,” she said, “if he isn’t cured, you’ll be hanging round him for
ever.”

“Yes, I suppose I shall be hanging round him for ever,” he answered.

“And more than that, you’ll be worrying yourself to death over it. I
can’t bear you to worry, Toto,” she said. She paused for a long minute
and then she scrutinized him closely.

“So it was you who rang him up on the telephone?” she said. “I thought
it was, from the beginning.”

“Oh, don’t let’s talk about that any more,” Grimshaw said; “I’m very
tired; I’m very lonely. I’ve discovered that there are things one can’t
do--that I’m not the man I thought I was. It’s you who are strong and
get what you want, and I’m only a meddler who muddles and spoils.
That’s the moral of the whole thing. Take me on your own terms and make
what you can of me. I am too lonely to go on alone any more. I’ve come
to give myself up. I went down to Brighton to give myself up to you on
condition that you cured Dudley Leicester. Now I just do it without any
conditions whatever.”

She looked at him a little ironically, a little tenderly.

“Oh, well, my dear,” she said, “we’ll talk about that when he’s cured.
Now come.”

She made him stand just before Leicester’s sprawled-out feet, and going
round behind the chair, resting her hands already on Leicester’s hair
in preparation for bending down to make, near his ear, the suggestion
that he should put his question, she looked up at Robert Grimshaw.

“You consent,” she said, with hardly a touch of triumph in her voice,
“that I should live with you as my mother lived with my father?” And
at Robert Grimshaw’s minute gesture of assent: “Oh, well, my dear,”
she continued quite gently, “it’s obvious to me that you’re more than
touched by this little Pauline of ours. I don’t say that I resent it.
I don’t suggest that it makes you care for me any less than you should
or did, but I’m sure, perfectly sure, of the fact such as it is, and
I’m sure, still more sure, that she cares extremely for you. So that
...” She had been looking down at Dudley Leicester’s forehead, but she
looked up again into Robert Grimshaw’s eyes. “I think, my dear,” she
said slowly, “as a precaution, I think you cannot have me on those
terms; I think you had better”--she paused for the fraction of a
minute--“marry me,” and her fingers began to work slowly upon Dudley
Leicester’s brows. There was the least flush upon her cheeks, the least
smile round the corners of her lips, she heaved the ghost of a sigh.

“So that you get me both ways,” Robert Grimshaw said; and his hands
fell desolately open at his side.

“Every way and altogether,” she answered.




EPISTOLARY EPILOGUE


“IT was a summer evening four years later when, upon the sands of
one of our most fashionable watering-places, a happy family group,
consisting of a buxom mother and several charming children, might have
been observed to disport itself. Who can this charming matron be, and
who these lovely children, designated respectively Robert, Dudley,
Katya, and Ellida?

“And who is this tall and robust gentleman who, wearing across the
chest of his white cricketing flannel the broad blue ribbon of His
Majesty’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, bearing in one hand negligently
the _Times_ of the day before yesterday and in the other a
pastoral rake, approaches from the hayfields, and, with an indulgent
smile, surveys the happy group? Taking from his mouth his pipe--for in
the _dolce far niente_ of his summer vacation, when not called
upon by his duties near the Sovereign at Windsor, he permits himself
the relaxation of the soothing weed--he remarks:

“‘The Opposition fellows have lost the by-election at Camber.’

“Oblivious of his pipe, the charming matron casts herself upon his
neck, whilst the children dance round him with cries of congratulation,
and the trim nurses stand holding buckets and spades with expressions
of respectful happiness upon their countenances. Who can this be?

“And who, again, are these two approaching along the sands with happy
and contented faces--the gentleman erect, olive-skinned, and, since his
wife has persuaded him to go clean-shaven, appearing ten years younger
than when we last saw him; the lady dark and tall, with the first signs
of matronly plumpness just appearing upon her _svelte_ form? They
approach and hold out their hands to the happy Cabinet Minister with
attitudes respectively of manly and ladylike congratulation, whilst
little Robert and little Katya, uttering joyful cries of ‘Godmama’
and ‘Godpapa!’ dive into their pockets for chocolates and the other
presents that they are accustomed to find there.

“Who can these be? Our friend the reader will have already guessed. And
so, with a moisture at the contemplation of so much happiness bedewing
our eyes, we lay down the pen, pack up the marionettes into their box,
ring down the curtain, and return to our happy homes, where the wives
of our bosoms await us. That we may meet again, dear reader, is the
humble and pious wish of your attached friend, the writer of these
pages.”


Thus, my dear ----, you would have me end this book, after I have taken
an infinite trouble to end it otherwise. No doubt, also, you would have
me record how Etta Hudson, as would be inevitably the case with such a
character, eventually became converted to Roman Catholicism, and ended
her days under the direction of a fanatical confessor in the practice
of acts of the most severe piety and mortification, Jervis, the butler
of Mr. Dudley Leicester, you would like to be told, remained a humble
and attached dependent in the service of his master; whilst Saunders,
Mr. Grimshaw’s man, thinking himself unable to cope with the duties of
the large establishment in Berkeley Square which Mr. Grimshaw and Katya
set up upon their marriage, now keeps a rose-clad hostelry on the road
to Brighton. But we have forgotten Mr. Held! Under the gentle teaching
of Pauline Leicester he became an aspirant for Orders in the Church
of England, and is now, owing to the powerful influence of Mr. Dudley
Leicester, chaplain to the British Embassy at St. Petersburg.

But since, my dear ----, all these things appear to me to be
sufficiently indicated in the book as I have written it, I must confess
that these additions, inspired as they are by you--but how much better
they would have been had you actually written them! these additions
appear to me to be ugly, superfluous, and disagreeable.

The foxes have holes, the birds of the air have nests, and you,
together with the great majority of British readers, insist upon having
a happy ending, or, if not a happy ending, at least some sort of an
ending. This is a desire, like the desire for gin-and-water or any
other comforting stimulant, against which I have nothing to say. You go
to books to be taken out of yourself, I to be shown where I stand. For
me, as for you, a book must have a beginning and an end. But whereas
for you the end is something arbitrarily final, such as the ring of
wedding-bells, a funeral service, or the taking of a public-house, for
me--since to me a novel is the history of an “affair”--finality is
only found at what seems to me to be the end of that “affair.” There
is in life nothing final. So that even “affairs” never really have an
end as far as the lives of the actors are concerned. Thus, although
Dudley Leicester was, as I have tried to indicate, cured almost
immediately by the methods of Katya Lascarides, it would be absurd to
imagine that the effects of his short breakdown would not influence the
whole of his after-life. These effects may have been to make him more
conscientious, more tender, more dogged, less self-centred; may have
been to accentuate him in a great number of directions. For no force is
ever lost, and the ripple raised by a stone, striking upon the bank of
a pool, goes on communicating its force for ever and ever throughout
space and throughout eternity. But for our vision its particular
“affair” ends when, striking the bank, it disappears. So for me the
“affair” of Dudley Leicester’s madness ended at the moment when Katya
Lascarides laid her hands upon his temple. In the next moment he would
be sane, the ripple of madness would have disappeared from the pond of
his life. To have gone on farther would have been, not to have ended
this book, but to have begun another, which--the fates being good--I
hope to write. I shall profit, without doubt, by your companionship,
instruction, and great experience. You have called me again and
again an Impressionist, and this I have been called so often that I
suppose it must be the fact. Not that I know what an Impressionist is.
Personally, I use as few words as I may to get any given effect, to
render any given conversation. You, I presume, do the same. You don’t,
I mean, purposely put in more words than you need--more words, that is
to say, than seem to you to satisfy your desire for expression. You
would probably render a conversation thus:

“Extending her hand, which was enveloped in creamy tulle, Mrs. Sincue
exclaimed, ‘Have another cup of tea, dear?’ ‘Thanks--two lumps,’ her
visitor rejoined. ‘So I hear Colonel Hapgood has eloped with his wife’s
French maid!’”

I should probably set it down:

“After a little desultory conversation, Mrs. Sincue’s visitor, dropping
his dark eyes to the ground, uttered in a voice that betrayed neither
exultation nor grief, ‘Poor old Hapgood’s cut it with Nanette. Don’t
you remember Nanette, who wore an apron with lace all round it and
those pocket things, and curled hair?’”

This latter rendering, I suppose, is more vague in places, and in other
places more accentuated, but I don’t see how it is more impressionist.
It is perfectly true you complain of me that I have not made it plain
with whom Mr. Robert Grimshaw was really in love, or that when he
resigned himself to the clutches of Katya Lascarides, whom personally
I extremely dislike, an amiable but meddlesome and inwardly conceited
fool was, pathetically or even tragically, reaping the harvest of his
folly. I omitted to add these comments, because I think that for a
writer to intrude himself between his characters and his reader is to
destroy to that extent all the illusion of his work. But when I found
that yourself and all the moderately quick-minded, moderately sane
persons who had read the book in its original form failed entirely to
appreciate what to me has appeared as plain as a pikestaff--namely,
that Mr. Grimshaw was extremely in love with Pauline Leicester, and
that, in the first place, by marrying her to Dudley Leicester, and, in
the second place, by succumbing to a disagreeable personality, he was
committing the final folly of this particular affair--when I realized
that these things were not plain, I hastened to add those passages
of explicit conversation, those droppings of the eyelids and tragic
motions of the hands, that you have since been good enough to say have
made the book.

Heaven knows, one tries enormously hard to be simple, to be even
transparently simple, but one falls so lamentably between two stools.
Thus, another reader, whom I had believed to be a person of some
intellect, has insisted to me that in calling this story “A Call” I
must have had in my mind something mysterious, something mystical; but
what I meant was that Mr. Robert Grimshaw, putting the ear-piece to
his ear and the mouthpiece to his mouth, exclaimed, after the decent
interval that so late at night the gentleman in charge of the exchange
needs for awaking from slumber and grunting something intelligible--Mr.
Grimshaw exclaimed, “Give me 4259 Mayfair.” This might mean that Lady
Hudson was a subscriber to the Post Office telephone system, but it
does not mean in the least that Mr. Grimshaw felt religious stirrings
within him or “A Call” to do something heroic and chivalrous, such as
aiding women to obtain the vote.

So that between those two classes of readers--the one who insist upon
reading into two words the whole psychology of moral revivalism, and
the others who, without gaining even a glimpse of meaning, will read
or skip through fifty or sixty thousand words, each one of which is
carefully selected to help on a singularly plain tale--between these
two classes of readers your poor Impressionist falls lamentably
enough to the ground. He sought to point no moral. His soul would
have recoiled within him at the thought of adorning by one single
superfluous word his plain tale. His sole ambition was to render
a little episode--a small “affair” affecting a little circle of
people--exactly as it would have happened. He desired neither to
comment nor to explain. Yet here, commenting and explaining, he
takes his humble leave, having packed the marionettes into the case,
having pulled the curtain down, and wiping from his troubled eyes the
sensitive drops of emotion. This may appear to be an end, but it isn’t.
He is, still, your Impressionist, thinking what the devil--what the
_very_ devil--he shall do to make his next story plain to the most
mediocre intelligence!




THE END




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