HE had searched the farmhouse, calling her name softly. He had peered into the lumber-room, where shadows were gathering. He had looked everywhere indoors. Now he stepped into the orchard and called more loudly, “Desire. Desire. Princess.”
Leaves shuddered. Across moss-grown paths slugs crawled. Everything betokened rain; all live things were hurrying for shelter. Behind high red walls, where peach-trees hung crucified, the end of day smoldered. The west was a vivid saffron. To the southward black clouds wheeled like vultures. The beauty of the garden shone intense. The greenness of apple-trees had deepened. Nasturtiums blazed like fire in the borders of box. The air was full of poignant fragrances: of lavender, of roses, and of cool, dean earth.
To-morrow night all that he was at present feeling would have become a memory. He called her name again and renewed his search. To-morrow night would she, too, have become a memory? How loud the whisper of his footsteps sounded I And if she had become a memory, would she forget—would the future prove faithless to the past?
The garden would not remember. The brook would babble no less contentedly because he was gone. All these flowers which shone so bravely—within a week they, too, would have vanished. The birds in the early morning would Scarcely notice his absence. In the autumn they would fly away; in the spring, when they returned, they would think no more of the boy who had parted the leaves so gently that a little girl might peep into their nests. And would the little girl remember? Even now, when he called, she did not answer.
In an angle of the garden, most remote from the farmhouse, he espied her. Something in her attitude made him halt Her head was thrown back; she was staring into a chestnut which tumbled its boughs across the wall. Her lips were moving. She seemed to be, talking; nothing reached him of what was said. At first he supposed she was acting a conversation.
“Desire,” he shouted. “Princess.”
She glanced across her shoulder and distinctly gave a warning. The chestnut quivered. He was certain some one was climbing down. She kissed her hand. The bough was still trembling when he reached her.
“Who was it?”
She pressed a finger to her lips.
“Was it Ruddy? But it couldn’t have been Ruddy unless——”
Beyond the wall he heard the sound of footsteps. They were stealing away through grass.
When he turned to her, she was smiling with mysterious tenderness.
“Who was it?”
She slipped her hand into his. “I am fond of you, dear Teddy, but I mustn’t, mustn’t tell.”
They walked in silence. Rain began to patter. They could hear it hiss as it splashed against the sunset.
“Best be getting indoors,” he said.
In the lumber-room, where so many happy hours had been spent, they sat with their faces pressed against the window.
“Do you want to play?”
He shook his head.
“You’re not sulky with me, Teddy, are you? It would be unkind if you were. I’m so happy.” She flung her arms about his neck, coaxing him to look at her. “What shall I do to make you glad? Shall I make the babies come into my eyes?”
He brushed his face against her carls. “It isn’t that. It’s not that I’m sulky.” Her hands fluttered to his lips that he might kiss them. “It’s—it’s only that I want you, and I’m afraid I may lose you.”
She laughed softly. “But I wouldn’t lose you. I wouldn’t let anybody, not even my beautiful mother, make me lose you. I would worry and worry and worry, till she brought me back.” She lowered her face and looked up at him slantingly. “I can make people do most anything when I worry badly.”
He smiled at her exact self-knowledge. She knew that she was forgiven and wriggled into his arms. “Why do you want me? I’m so little and not nice always.”
“I don’t know why I want you, unless——”
“Unless?” she whispered.
“Unless it’s because I’ve been always lonely.”
She frowned, so he hastened to add, “But I know I do want you.”
“When I’m a big lady do you think you’ll still want me?”
“Ah!” He tried to imagine her as a big lady. “You’ll be proud then, I expect. I once knew a big lady and she wasn’t—wasn’t very kind. I think I like you little best.” Outside it was growing dark. The rain beat against the window. The musty smell of old finery in boxes fitted with the melancholy of the sound.
“I’m glad you like me little best, because,” she drew her fingers down his cheek, “because, you see, I’m little now. But when I’m a big lady, I shall want you to like me best as I am then.”
He laughed. “I wonder whether you will—whether you’ll care.”
“You say all the wrong things.” She struggled to free herself. “You’re making me sad.”
“D’you know what you’ll be when you grow up?”
She ceased struggling; she was tremendously interested in herself.
“What?”
“A flirt.”
“What is a flirt?” she asked earnestly.
“A flirt’s a——” He puzzled to find words. “A flirt’s a very beautiful woman who makes every one love her especially, and loves nobody in particular herself.”
She clapped her hands. “Oh, I hope I shall.”
Outside her bedroom at parting she stopped laughing. “I am fond of you, dear Teddy.”
“Of course you are.”
She pouted. “Oh, no, not of course. I’m not fond of everybody.”
He had set too low a value on her graciousness. He had often done it wilfully before for the fun of seeing her give herself airs. “I didn’t mean ‘of course’ like that,” he apologized; “I meant I didn’t doubt it.”
“But—but,” she sighed, “you don’t say the right things, Teddy—no, never. You don’t understand.”
What did she want him to say, this little girl who was alternately a baby and a woman? When he had puzzled his brain and had failed to guess, he stooped to kiss her good-night She turned her face away petulantly; the next moment she had turned it back and was clinging to him desperately. “I don’t want to leave you. I don’t want to leave you.”
“You shan’t.” He had caught something of her passion. “Mrs. Sheerug has promised. She lives quite near our house, and you’ll be my little sister. You shall come and feed my pigeons, and see my father paint pictures. My mother’s called Dearie—did I tell you that? Don’t be frightened; I’ll lie awake all to-night in case you call.”
“No, sleep.” She drew her fingers down his face caressingly. “Sleep for my sake, Teddy.”
He tried to keep awake, but his eyes grew heavy. Farmer Joseph and Mrs. Sarie came creaking up the stairs. The house was left to shadows. Several times he slipped from his bed and tiptoed to the door. More than once he fancied he heard sounds. They always stopped the second he stirred. The monotonous dripping of rain lulled him. It was like an army of footsteps which advanced and halted, advanced and halted. Even through his sleep they followed.
It seemed the last notes of a dream. He sat up and rubbed his eyes. Where was he? In his thoughts he had gone back years. He ought to have been in Mrs. Sheerug’s bedroom, with the harp standing thinly against the panes and the kettle purring on the fire. He was confused at finding that the room was different. While that voice sang on, he had no time for puzzling.
It came from outside in the darkness, where trees knelt beneath the sky like camels. Sometimes it seemed very far away, and sometimes just beneath his window. It made him think of faeries dancing by moonlight It was like the golden hair of the Princess Lettice lowered from her casement to her lover. It was like the silver feet of laughter twinkling up a Beanstalk ladder to the stars. It was like spread wings, swooping and drifting over a faery-land of castellated tree-tops. It grew infinitely distant. He strained his ears; it was almost lost It kept calling and calling to his heart.
Something was moving. A shadow stole across his doorway. It was gone in an instant—gone so quickly that, between sleeping and waking, it might have been imagined. His heart was pounding.
In her room he saw the white blur of her bed. Timid lest he should disturb her, he groped his hand across her pillow. It was still warm.
As he ran down the passage a cold draught met him. The door into the farmyard was open. He hesitated on the threshold, straining his eyes into the dusk of moonlight that leaked from under clouds. As he listened, he heard Desire’s laugh, low and secret, and the whisper of departing footsteps. Barefooted he followed. In the road, the horses’ beads turned towards the wood, a carriage was standing with its lamps extinguished. The door opened; there was the sound of people entering; then it slammed.
“Desire! Desire!”
The driver humped his shoulders, tugged at the reins, and lashed furiously; the horses leapt forward and broke into a gallop. From the window Vashti leant out. A child’s hand fluttered. He ran on breathlessly.
Under the roof of the woods all was blackness. The sounds of travel grew fainter. When he reached the meadows beyond, there was nothing but the mist of moonlight on still shadows—he heard nothing but the sullen weeping of rain-wet trees and grass. He threw himself down beside the road, clenching his hands and sobbing.
Next day Hal arrived to fetch him back to London. The wagonette was already standing at the door. He thought that he had said all his farewells, fixed everything indelibly on his memory, when he remembered the lumber-room. Without explanation, he dashed into the house and climbed the stairs.
Pushing open the door, he entered gently. It was here, if anywhere, that he might expect to find her—the last place in which they had been together. Old’ finery, dragged from boxes by her hands, lay strewn about. The very sunshine, groping across the floor, seemed to be searching for her. He was going over to the place by the window where they had sat, when he halted, bending forward. Scrawled dimly in the dust upon the panes, in childish writing, were the words, “I love you.” And again, lower down, “I love you.”
His heart gave a bound. That was what she had been trying to make him say last night, “I love you.” He hadn’t said it—hadn’t realized or thought it possible that two children could love like that. He knew now what she had meant, “You don’t say the right things, Teddy—no, never. You don’t understand.” He knew now that from the first he had loved her; his boyish fear of ridicule had forbidden him to own it. There on the panes, like a message from the dead, soon to be overlaid with dust, was her confession.
Voices called to him, bidding him hurry. Footsteps were ascending. Some one was coming along the passage. The writing was sacred. It was meant for his eyes alone. No one should see it but himself. He stooped his lips to the pane. When Hal entered the writing had vanished.
“You—you played here,” he said. All day he had been white and silent “I’m sorry, but we really must be going now, old chap.”
On the stairs, where it was dark, he laid an arm on the boy’s shoulder.
“You got to be very fond of her? We were both fond of her and—and we’ve both lost her. I think I understand.”
The journey back to London was like the waking moments of a dream. He gazed out of the carriage window. He couldn’t bear to look at Hal; his eyes seemed dead, as though all the mind behind them was full of darkened passages. It wasn’t easy to be brave just now, so he turned his face away from him.
“Teddy.” There was no one in the carriage but themselves. “Did she ever say anything about me?”
“She said that you were fond of her.”
“Ah, yes, but I don’t mean that. Did she ever say how she felt herself?”
“About you?”
“About me.”
There was hunger in Hal’s voice—hunger in the way he listened for the answer.
“Not—not exactly. But she liked you immensely. She really did, Hal. She looked forward most awfully to your coming.”
“Any child would have done that when a man brought her presents. Then she didn’t say she loved me? No, she wouldn’t say that.”
Hal spoke bitterly. Teddy felt that Desire was being accused and sprang to her defense. “I don’t see how you could expect her to love you after what you had done.” The man looked up sharply. “After what I had done! D’you mean kidnaping her, or something further back?”
“I mean taking her away from her mother.”
Hal laughed gloomily. “No, as you say, a person with no claims on her couldn’t expect her to love him after that.”
Sinking his head forward, he relapsed into silence and sat staring at the seat opposite. When the train was galloping through the outskirts of London, he spoke again.
“I’ve dragged you into something that you don’t understand. Don’t try to understand it; but there’s something I want to say to you. If ever you’re tempted to do wrong, remember me. If ever you’re tempted to get love the wrong way, be strong enough to do without it. It isn’t worth having. You have to lie and cheat to get it at first, and you have to lie and cheat to keep some of it when it’s ended.” He turned his face away, speaking shamefully and hurriedly. “I sinned once, a long while ago—I don’t know whether you’ve guessed. I’m still paying for it. You’re paying for it. One day that little girl may have to pay the biggest price of any of us. I was trying to save her from that.”
Through the window shabby rows of cabs showed up. A porter jumped on the step, asking if there was any luggage. Hal waved him back. Turning to Teddy, he said, “When you’ve sinned, you never know where the paying ends. It touches a thousand lives with its selfishness. Remember me one day, and be careful.”
Driving home in the hansom, he referred but once to the subject “I’ve made you suffer. I don’t know how much—boys never tell. I owed you something; that’s why I spoke to you just now.”
Teddy’s arrival home scattered the last mists of his dream-world. As the cab drew up before the house, the door flew open and his father burst out, bundling a mildly protesting old gentleman down the steps.
“No, I don’t paint little pigs,” he was shouting, “and I don’t paint little girls sucking their thumbs and cooing, ‘I’m baby.’ You’ve come to the wrong shop, old man; no offense. I’m an artist; the man you’re looking for is a sign-painter. Good evening.”
The door banged in the old gentleman’s face. Jimmie Boy was so enjoying his anger that he didn’t notice that in closing the door he was shutting out his son.
When Teddy had been admitted by Jane, he heard his mother’s voice dodging through his father’s laughter like a child through a crowd.
“You needn’t have been so sharp with him, Jimmie. He only wanted to buy the kind of pictures you don’t paint You can’t expect every one to understand. Now he’ll go the rounds and talk about you, and you’ll have another enemy. Why do you do it, my silly old pirate?”
The old pirate pretended to become suspicious that his wife was trying to lower his standards—trying to persuade him to paint the rubbish that would sell She protested her innocence. Long after Teddy had made his presence known the argument continued, half in banter, half in seriousness. Then it took the familiar turning which led to a discussion of finance.
He stole away. The impatient world had swept him back into its maelstrom of realities. It had taken away his breath and staggered his courage. Hal’s harangue on the consequences of sin had made him see sin everywhere. He saw his father as sinning when he indulged his genius by pushing would-be purchasers down his steps. Hal was right—he and Dearie would have to pay for that; all their lives they had been paying for his father’s temperament. They had had to go short of everything because he would insist on trying to exchange his dreams for money.
He wandered out into the garden where his pigeons were flying. Instinctively his steps led him to the stable. From the stalls he dragged out The Garden Enclosed, which was to have made his father famous. He gazed at it; as he gazed, the world seemed better. The world must be a happy place so long as there were women in it like that. People said that his father hadn’t succeeded; but he had by being true to what he knew to be best.
He climbed the ladder to the studio where, through long years of discouragement, his father had refused to stoop below himself. Leaning from the window, he gazed into the garden. The dusty smell of the ivy came to him.
There in the darkness his mother found him. Coming in quietly, she crouched beside him, taking his hands.
“Mother, you’re very beautiful.”
Her heart quickened. “Something’s happened. Once you wouldn’t have said that.”
“I’ve been thinking about so many things,” he whispered, “about how it must have helped a man to have had some one like you always to himself.”
“You were thinking,” she brushed his cheek with hers, “you were thinking about yourself—about the long, long future.”
“Yes.” His voice scarcely reached her. “I was growing frightened because of Hal. I was feeling kind of lonely. Then I thought of you and Jimmie Boy. It would be fearful to grow up like Hal.”
“You won’t, Teddy.”
There was a long silence. They could hear each other’s thoughts ticking. At last he whispered, “Desire said she never had a father.”
“Poor little girl! You must have guessed?”
“Hal?”
Choking back her tears, she nodded.
“Things like that——” He broke off, staring into the darkness. “Things like that make a boy frightened, when first they’re told him.” She drew his head down to her shoulder. He lay there without speaking, feeling sheltered for the moment. All the threats of manhood, the fears that he might fail, the terror lest he might miss the highest things like Hal, drew away into the distance.
In the night, when he awoke and they returned, he drove them off with a new purpose. The pity and white chivalry of his boyhood were aflame with what he had learnt. Until he met her again, he would keep himself spotless. She should be to him what the Holy Grail was to Sir Gala-had. He would fight to be good and great not for his own sake—that would be lonely; but that he might be strong, when he became a man, to pay the price for Desire that Hal’s sin had imposed on her.
Fear is a form of loneliness; it was Ruddy who cured Teddy of that.
For years they had met in Orchid Lodge and up and down Eden Row, nodding to each other with the contemptuous tolerance of boys whose parents are friends. It was the shared memory of the adventure in the woodland that brought them together.
Two days after his return from the farm he stole out into Eden Row as night was falling. In the park, across the river, the bell for closing time was ringing. On tennis courts, between slumbering chestnuts, men in flannels were putting on their coats and gathering their shoes and rackets, while slim wraiths of girls waited for them. They swept together and drifted away through the daffodil-tinted dusk. Clear laughter floated across the river and the whisper of reluctantly departing footsteps. Park keepers, like angels in Eden, marched along shadowy paths, herding the lovers and driving them before them, shouting in melancholy tones, “All out. All out.” They seemed to be proclaiming that nothing could last.
“Hulloa!”
Teddy turned to find the sturdy figure in the midshipman’s suit leaning against the railings beside him.
“Must be rather jolly to be like that.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, don’t be a sausage.” Ruddy smiled imperturbably. “To be like them—old enough to put your arm round a girl without making people laugh.”
“Yes.”
Ruddy sank his voice. “Wonder where they all come from. Suppose they look quite proper by daylight, as though they’d never speak to a chap.”
The crowd was pouring out from the gates and melting away by twos and twos. Each couple seemed to walk in its own separate world, walled in by memories of tender things done and said. As they passed beneath lamps, the girls drew a little apart from their companions; but as they entered long intervals of twilit gloom their propriety relaxed.
Turning away from the river, the boys followed the crowd at random. Once Ruddy hurried forward to peer into a girl’s face as she passed beneath a lamp. She had flaxen hair which broke in waves about her shoulders.
Teddy flushed. He had wanted to do it himself, but something had restrained him. Secretly he admired Ruddy’s boldness. “Don’t do that,” he whispered.
“She looked pretty from the back,” Ruddy explained. “Wanted to see by her face whether her boy had been kissing her. You are a funny chap.”
They got tired of wandering. On the edge of a low garden wall, with their backs against the railing, they seated themselves. It was in a road of small villas, dotted with golden windows and shadowy with the foam of foliage.
Ruddy pulled out a cigarette. “I liked her most awfully. Us’ally I don’t like girls.”
“Desire?” Teddy’s heart bounded at being able to speak her name so frankly.
“Desire. Yes. I’ve got an idea that she’s a sort of relation. Ma won’t tell a thing about her. I can’t ask Hal—he’s too cut up. When I speak to Harriet, she says ‘Hush.’ There’s a mystingry.”
For a week Ruddy opened his heart wider and wider, till he had all but confessed that he was in love with Desire. Then one day, with the depressed air of a conspirator, he inveigled Teddy into the shrubbery of Orchid Lodge.
“Want to ask you something. You think I’m in love with that kid, Desire, don’t you? Well, I’m not.”
“I’m glad you’re not, because—you oughtn’t to be. Why you oughtn’t to be, I can’t tell you.”
“But I never was.”
“Oh, weren’t you?” Teddy shrugged his shoulders.
Up went Ruddy’s fists. His face grew red and his eyes became suspiciously wet. “You’re the only one who knows it. You’ve got to say I wasn’t. If you don’t, I’ll fight you.”
“But you’ve just said that I’m the only one who knows it. You silly chump, you’ve owned that you were in love.”
Ruddy stood hesitant; his fists fell “Don’t know what God’ll do to me. I’ve been in love with my——” He gulped. “I’m her uncle.”
For a fortnight he posed as a figure of guilt and hinted darkly at suicide. But the world at fifteen is too adventurous a place for even a boy who has been in love with his niece to remain long tragic. It was on this dark secret of his unclehood, that his momentous friendship with Teddy was founded. Mrs. Sheerug approved of it; she did all that she could to encourage it. She sent him to Mr. Quickly’s school in Eden Row which Teddy attended. From that moment the boys’ great days began.
It was Ruddy who invented one of their most exciting games, Enemies or Friends. This consisted in picking out some inoffensive boy from among their school-fellows and overwhelming him with flatteries. He was made the recipient of presents and invited to tea on half-holidays, till his suspicions of evil intentions were quite laid to rest. Then one afternoon, when school was over, he was lured into Orchid Lodge to look at the pigeons. Once within the garden walls, Orchid Lodge became a brigand’s castle, the boy a captive, and Ruddy and Teddy his captors. The boy was locked up in the tool-shed for an hour and made to promise by the most fearful threats not to divulge to his mother what had delayed him. Intended victims of this game knew quite well what fate was in store for them; a rumor of the brigands’ perfidy had leaked out. The chief sport in its playing lay in the Machiavellian methods employed to persuade the latest favorite that, whatever had happened to his predecessors, he was the great exception, beloved only for himself.
Opportunity for revenge arrived when Teddy’s first attempt at authorship was published. Mr. Quickly, the Quaker headmaster, brought out a magazine each Christmas to which his students were invited to contribute. Teddy’s contribution was entitled The Angel’s Sin. Perhaps it was inspired by remorse for his misdoings. Dearie nearly cried her eyes out when she read it, she was so impressed by its piety. But it moved his school-fellows to ridicule—especially the much-wronged boys who had spent an hour in the tool-shed. They recited it in chorus between classes; they followed him home reciting it; they stood outside the windows of his house and bawled it at him through the railings. “Heaven was silent, for one had sinned. Before the throne of God a prostrate figure lay. But the throne was wrapped in clouds. A voice rang out,” etc.
“They have no souls,” his mother whispered comfortingly.
The Angel’s Sin cost the brigands many bruises and their mothers much repairing of torn clothing. Teddy’s mother declared that it was all worth it—she had spent her life in paying the price for having genius in her family; Mrs. Sheerug was doubtful Ruddy was loyal in his public defense of Teddy, but secretly disapproving. “Stupid ass! Why did you do it? Why didn’t you write about pirates? Might have known we’d get ragged.”
Teddy shook his head. He was quite as much puzzled as Ruddy. “Don’t know. It just came to me. I had to do it.”
The Christmas holidays brought a joyous week. Teddy had a cold and was kept in bed. The light was too bad for painting, so his father came and sat with him.
“You’re younger than you were, chappie—more like what I used to be at your age. That young ruffian’s doing you good. What d’you play at?”
When penny dreadfuls were mentioned, Jimmie Boy closed one eye and squinted at his son humorously. “That’s not much of a diet—not much in keeping with The Ange’s Sin and a boy who’s going to be a genius. Tell you what I’ll do; let’s have Ruddy in and I’ll reform you.”
Then began a magic chain of nights and days. As soon as the breakfast-tray had been carried down, Jimmie Boy would commence his reading. It was Margaret of Valois that he chose as being the nearest thing in literature to a penny dreadful. Teddy, lying cosily between sheets, would listen to the booming voice, which rumbled like a gale about the pale walls of the bedroom. Seated in a great armchair, with his pipe going like a furnace and his knees spread apart before the fire, his rebel father acted out with his free hand all the glorious love scenes and stabbings. Ruddy, stretched like a dog upon the floor, his elbows digging into the carpet, gazed up at Jimmie Boy adoringly. For a week they kept company with kings and queens, listening to the clash of swords and witnessing the intrigue of stolen kisses. They wandered down moonlit streets of Paris, were present at the massacre of St. Batholomew’s Eve, and saw the Duchess of Guise, having rescued Coconnas from the blades of the Huguenots, hide him, dripping with blood, in her secret closet.
When Margaret of Valois was ended, Hereward the Wake followed, and then Rienzi.
“And that’s literature,” Jimmie Boy told them. “How about your penny dreadfuls now?”
In the afternoons Dearie would join them. “You three boys,” she called them. She always made a pretense that she was intruding, till she had been entreated in flowery romance language to enter. Then, sitting on the bed like a tall white queen, her hand clasped in Teddy’s, she would watch dreamily, with those violet eyes of hers, the shaggy head of Jimmie Boy tossing in a melody of words.
It was this week, with its delving into ancient stories, that taught him what his parents’ love really meant—it was a rampart thrown up by the soul against calamity. They had been poor and harassed and disappointed. There had been times when they had spoken crossly. But in their hearts they still stood hand-in-hand, always guarding a royal place in which they could be happy.
“I say,” whispered Ruddy, “your people—they’re toppers. Let’s go slow on the penny dreadfuls.”
As the years passed the two boys grew into explorers of the undiscovered countries that lie behind the tail-treed reticence of people’s minds. Their sole equipment for these gallant raids was a daring sort of kindness.
Ruddy’s actions were inspired by good nature and high spirits; Teddy’s by introspection and a determination to inquire. He was possessed by a relentless curiosity to find out how things worked.
By a dramatic turn of luck their faculty for curious friendships flung the whole Sheerug household, and Jimmie Boy with it, high up on the strand of what Mrs. Sheerug would have termed “a secure nincome.”
At the time when this happened Teddy was already getting his hand in by helping his father with the letter-press for his illustrated volumes. Ruddy, much to Mrs. Sheerug’s disgust, had announced his intention of “going on the sands,” by which he meant becoming a pierrot.
One sparkling morning in June they were setting out for Brighton. Ruddy had heard of a troupe who were playing there and was anxious to add to his store of pierrot-knowledge. At the last moment, as the train was moving, a distinguished looking man who had been dawdling on the platform seemed to make up his mind to travel by it Paying no heed to the warning shouts of porters, as coolly as if he had been catching a passing bus, he leapt on the step of the boys’ third-class smoker, unlocked the door and entered.
“Handy things to keep about you,” he said, “keys to Tallway carriages. Oh, a third! Thought it was a first. Too bad. Make the best of it.”
There was a cheerful insolence about the way in which he sniffed, “Oh, a third!” addressing nobody in particular and thinking his thoughts aloud. He had a fine, rolling baritone. His aristocratic, drawling way of talking set up an immediate barrier between himself and the world—a barrier which he evidently expected the world to recognize.
Ruddy raised a democratic foot and tapped him on the shin. “Your ticket’s a third. It’s in your hand.”
The distinguished looking man leant down and flapped his trousers with his glove where the democratic foot had touched it Then he fixed Ruddy with a haughty stare. “Ah! So it is. Chap must have given it me in error.”
He settled himself in a corner, paying the utmost attention to his comfort, screwed a monocle in his eye and spread a copy of The Pink ’Un before him.
The boys threw inquiring glances at each other. Why should this ducal looking individual, with his complete self-assurance and patronizing vastness, have worried himself to try to make them believe that he was traveling third-class by accident? Was he an escaping criminal or a lunatic? Had the porters who had shouted warnings at him been disguised detectives? Was there any chance of his becoming violent when they entered the Box Hill Tunnel?
They scrutinized him carefully. He was probably nearing forty; he wore a straw hat, a black flannel suit with a thin white stripe running down it, patent-leather shoes and canvas spats. Everything about him was of expensive cut and bore the stamp of fashion. His face was wrinkled like a bloodhound’s, his hair sleek and tawny, his complexion brick-red with good living. His nose was slightly Roman, his eyes a sleepy gray; his attitude towards the world one of fastidious boredom. He was a large-framed man and would pass for handsome.
Ruddy was not easily awed. Reaching under the seat, he drew out one of the boxes which Mr. Hughes had entrusted to him.
“What message shall we send? The usual?”
On a narrow strip of paper he wrote, “We have just completed another murder.” As the train slowed down at Red Hill, he leant out of the window and tossed the pigeon up.
“Never trouble trouble, till trouble troubles you.”
The distinguished looking person had laid aside his paper.
“Excuse me,” he said, and with that he drew off his patent-leather shoes and rested his feet on the window ledge to air them.
“Tight?” suggested Teddy politely.
“Very,” said the distinguished looking person. “To tell the truth, they’re not mine. I’m too kind-hearted.”
He picked up his paper and wriggled his toes in his silk socks. It was difficult to trace the connection between wearing tight shoes and kind-heartedness.
“A mystingry,” whispered Ruddy.
“Eh! What’s that?” The Roman nose appeared for an instant above The Pink ’Un and the lazy gray eyes twinkled. “I’m wearing ’em easy out of affection for a dear friend. No splendor without pain. I take the pain and leave him the splendor.”
Both boys nodded as though his explanation had made his conduct, which had at first seemed unusual, entirely conventional. Teddy drew a pencil from his pocket and commenced to make a surreptitious sketch. If the imposing stranger were anything that he ought not to be, it might come in useful.
“What are you doing?” The paper was tossed aside. “Humph! Colossal! If I may, I’ll keep it I’m a black-and-white artist myself.” He narrowed his eyes as if to hide their real expression. “You won’t know my name. I’m what you might call a professional amateur. Could make a fortune at it, but won’t be bothered with the vulgarity of selling.” And then, with an airy wave of his hand, flicking the ash off his cigarette: “Of course I don’t need to.”
“Of course not,” said Teddy, with winning frankness.
“Of course not,” echoed Ruddy, with a sly intonation, winking at the patent-leather shoes.
The stranger, who had been using the seat as a couch, shifted his position and glanced at Ruddy. “My dee-ar boy, I meant that. If you have very affectionate friends and enough of them, you never need to earn money. It was only when I was young—about as young as you are—that I was fool enough to labor.” He pronounced it “laybore.”
“Well, I’ve not been fool enough to ’laybore’ yet,” said Ruddy, with sham indignation, as though defending himself from a shameful accusation.
“If you do what I do, there’ll be no necessity.” The stranger closed his eyes. “If you cater to the world’s vanity you can live well and do nothing. There’s nothing—absolute—” he yawned widely, “—lutely nothing to prevent you.”
They waited for his eyes to open. If he wasn’t mad, he was the possessor of a secret—a secret after which all the world was groping: nothing more nor less than how to fare sumptuously and not to work. But his eyes remained shut. Ruddy spoke. “I wish you’d tell us how.”
The stranger didn’t answer; he appeared to be sleeping—sleeping, however, with considerate care not to crumple the beautiful flannel suit The train raced on. A clear, sea-look was appearing above the Sussex Downs, like the bright reflection of a mirror flashing. It was exasperating. They would soon be at Brighton and this man would escape them with his valuable knowledge.
On the second message they sent back to Mr. Hughes they wrote, “A mystingry.” On the third, “The mystingry deepens.”
Brakes began to grind, slowing down the train as they neared their destination. The man sat up. “Best be putting on my shoes.”
Ruddy seized his last opportunity. “Look here, it ’ud be awfully decent of you if you’d tell us.”
“Tell you?”
“How to cater to people’s vanities. How to live without doing a stroke of work. My father’s been trying for years—he’s a promoter. You might tell us.”
“So your father’s a promoter!” The man was pulling on his spats. “Well, I’ll give you a hint and let you reason the rest out There are more women in the world than men, aren’t there? The women are always trying to win the men’s affection. The way in which they think they can do it is by being beautiful. There!”
“That’s a long stoop,” said Ruddy; “let me button them for you.”
By the time the spats were buttoned they had come to a halt in the station.
The man stood up. “Here’s my card. We may meet again.”
He jumped out of the carriage, leaving Ruddy turning his card over. It bore no address, only a name, Duke Ninevah.
“Not the Duke of,” whispered Teddy, peering over his shoulder, “so it can’t be a title.”
“Here, come on,” said Ruddy. “Let’s follow him.”
Further down the platform they saw Duke Ninevah helping a lady from a first-class carriage. She was slight and extremely stylish; even at that distance they guessed she must be beautiful. They had begun to follow when they remembered that they had left the empty pigeon boxes behind. They dashed back to find them; when they again looked up and down the platform, Duke Ninevah and his lady had vanished.
“Must be traceable,” said Ruddy. “Here, let’s leave these things at the parcel-room and clear for action. Now then, let’s use our intellecks. What does one come to the seaside for? To see the sea. We’ll find him either in it or beside it Why does one bring a lady to Brighton? To make love to her, and to make love one needs to be private. We’ve to find a private place by the sea, and then he’s cornered.”
“And what about the pierrots?”
“Let ’em wait. Humph!”
As they came down on to the promenade the waves heliographed to them. A warm south wind flapped against their faces. The air was full of voices, rising and falling and blending: ice-cream men shouting their wares; cabmen inviting hire; an evangelist, balancing on a chair and screaming “Redemption! Redemption!”; a comedian, dressed like a sultan and bawling breathlessly, “I’m the Emperor of Sahara, Tarara, Tarara”; the under-current chatter of conversation, and the laughing screams of girls as they stepped down from bathing huts and felt the first chill of the bubbling surf. Wriggling out like sea-serpents, their tails tethered to the land, were piers with swarms of insect-looking objects creeping along their backs. Gayety everywhere, and somewhere the man who knew how pleasure could be had without working! “By the sea with privacy,” Ruddy kept murmuring; the more remote their chances grew of finding him, the more certain they became that Duke Ninevah had a secret worth the knowing.
They had searched everywhere. It was afternoon and soon they would have to be returning. “Why not try the piers,” suggested Teddy; “if I wanted to gaze at the sea and make love to anybody——”
“Good idea. So would I.”
They passed through the turnstile and recommenced their quest On approaching a shelter, halfway down the pier, their attention was arrested by a slight and lonely figure. She was crouched in a corner with her head sunk forward.
“Hulloa! Left his girl. Let’s present his card and talk with her.”
But when they had walked round the glass shield of the shelter, they saw that she was sleeping. She must be sleeping soundly, for the insistent yapping of a Pomeranian did not seem to disturb her. Her hands lay loosely folded in her lap; in one of them a crumpled hankerchief was clutched. It was plain that she had been crying.
“She’s pretty!” They stole nearer. Then, “Jumping Jehosaphat!”
The tears had washed the color from her cheeks in places; they still hung sparkling on her painted lashes. With the sagging of her head her hat had slipped, and with it her wig, so that a scanty lock of white hair escaped across her forehead. But none of these things had called for the exclamation; they were apprehended at the same moment by something far more startling.
The lady’s head had came forward with a jerk; her mouth opened; her girlish beauty became convulsed, and then crumbled. As though a living creature were forcing an exit, something white and gleaming shot from her mouth. A complete set of excellent false teeth were only prevented from falling into the sea by the excited Pomeranian, who pounced on them and raced away, as though it were in expectation of precisely this event that he had been waiting.
In a flash the boys gave chase, leaving the distressed, scarcely awakened lady gazing after them and clasping imploring hands.
“Here’s a go!” panted Ruddy as they dodged through the crowd. “She’ll lose ’em for a cert. Why, I could have been in love with her myself if this hadn’t—— What a rumpage!”
They were nearing the turnstile. Above the turmoil of their pursuit they heard the comedian on the sands still declaring, “I’m the Emperor of Sahara, Tarara, Tarara.” Probably he was. In Brighton anything was possible. To Teddy it seemed a mad romance, a wild topsy-turvy, a staged burlesque in which Arthurian knights rescued ladies’ teeth instead of their virtue. Of the two, in Brighton, false teeth were the more precious.
The day was hot The Pomeranian was fat Perhaps in Pomerania false teeth are more nutritious. He was beginning to have doubts as to their value, for he had twice turned his head, wondering whether peace might be patched up with honor. He was turning for a third time when he blundered full tilt into a nursemaid’s skirts. He was so startled by the weight of the child she dropped on him that he abandoned his loot and fled. Of the two pursuers Teddy was the first to arrive. Snatching up the teeth, before they could be trampled by the crowd which the child’s screams were attracting, he wrapped them in his pocket-handkerchief, hiding them from public view, and strolled back unconcernedly. But what to do next? How to return them? How to put the lady to least shame?
“Well, they are hers,” Ruddy argued. “She knows that we know she wears ’em. They’re no good to us; and we shouldn’t have chased the dog unless we’d thought that she’d like to have ’em. You’re too delicate-minded.”
Seen from a distance as they approached her, she looked slight as a schoolgirl. Is was impossible to believe that she was really an old woman. She came hurrying towards them with one hand held out and the other pressed against her mouth. Not a word was said as her lost property was returned. The moment she had it, she walked to the side of the pier and gazed seawards, while both boys turned their backs. She was closing her vanity-case when she called to them.
They stared. The powder-puff and mirror had done their work. To the not too observing eye she was a girl.
“I want to thank you.” She gave them each a small gloved hand. “I’d like to send you a reward if you’ll give me your address. May I?”
They shook their heads. Ruddy acted spokesman. “No. But let us stay till Mr. Nineveh comes back.”
“Duke! You know him?”
She had a charming, flute-like note in her voice when she asked a question.
“We’ve been hunting him all day.”
“Why?”
“He said he knew how to get pleasure without,” Ruddy’s face puckered with genial impertinence, “without ’laybore’.”
The lady laughed. “I think I could tell you how he does it. You’ll never guess what the naughty man did to me. He brought me down here for one dear little day to our two selves and then,” she raised her shoulders ever so slightly, “he saw a pretty face and left me in the shelter to wait for him. I’ve waited; I’ve not had any lunch.”
“Had no lunch!” Teddy spoke in the tones of one to whom a missed meal spelled tragedy.
“You see, he carries my purse,” she explained.
The boys asked each other questions with their eyes, jingled the coins in their pockets and nodded.
“If you wouldn’t mind coming with us——”
She looked at them, this young girl, who was old enough to be their grandmother. “You’re very kind.” She smiled mysteriously. “Yes, I’ll let you treat me.”
They took her to the confectioner’s in a side street where they had had their midday meal. It was inexpensive. Seated at a marble-topped table, while trippers came in and out for buns, she looked strangely and exotically elegant.
She noticed that they weren’t eating. “Aren’t you having anything yourselves?”
“Not hungry.”
She guessed their shortage of funds. “You’re kinder than I thought First you prevent me from—well, from becoming seventy and then you take care of me with the last of your money. I’ve known a good many boys and men—they were all greedy, especially the men. But there’s something still more wonderful—something you haven’t done. You didn’t laugh at me when—— I’m always losing them one way or another. I’m in constant dread that Duke’ll see me without them. I know you won’t tell.”
“Has your husband got your ticket?” asked Teddy. He was wondering how they could get her to London.
She looked puzzled. “My husband?” She gave a comic little smile. “My husband—oh, yes! We can meet him at the station. I know the train by which he’ll travel.”
Then she commenced to coquette with them till they blushed. “I’m a silly old woman trying to be young, but you like it all the same.”
They did, for when she bent towards them laughing, fluttering her gay little hands, they forgot the strand of white hair and the way in which they had seen her beauty crumble.
“Ah, but when I was a girl, really a girl, not a painted husk, how you would have loved me! All the men loved me—so many that I can’t remember. What a life I’ve had! And you—you have all your lives before you.”
She made them feel that—this unaccountable old woman—made them throb to the wonder of having all their lives before them. She told them stories of herself to illustrate what that meant—risqu茅 stories which failed of being utterly improper by ending abruptly. It was done with the gravest innocence.
They wandered out on to the promenade. The sun was going down. The waves were tipped with a flamingo redness. It was as though scarlet birds were darting so swiftly that they could not see their bodies.
“Let me be old,” she whispered, “what I am, before I see him. It’s such a rest.”
From frivolity she grew confessional. It seemed as though her false youth fell away from her and only the tell-tale paint was left “If I’d been wiser, I’d have had two boys like you for grandsons. But I’ve not been wise, my dears. I’ve always wanted to be loved; I’ve broken hearts, and now—— When a woman gets to my age, she’s left to do all the loving. I’m condemned to be always, always young. I’d like best, if I could choose, to be just a simple old woman. I’d like to wear a lace cap and no, corsets, and to sit rocking by a window, watching for you boys to come and tell me your hopes and troubles. You must have very dear mothers. I wonder—— If I asked you to visit me—not the me I look now, but the real me—would you come?”
At the station they were climbing into a third, when Duke Nineveh came breezily up.
“Ha! How d’you manage that? Made friends with Madame Josephine, have you?” Then to Madame Josephine, “I say, it’ll hurt business if you’re seen traveling third. Appearances, appearances, my dear—they’ve got to be kept up.”
“Oh, Duke, for once I’m not caring.”
She sat herself down between the two boys, like the little old lady she was, holding a hand of each in her lap. Duke Nineveh waited till her head was nodding, then drew off his shoes softly. “They’ve hurt most confoundedly all day.” He turned to Ruddy. “So your father’s a promoter! Is he any good at it?”
“Good at it! Phew! A regular steam-engine when he gets started.”
“Does he promote everything? I mean, he’s not too particular about what he handles?”
The description Ruddy gave of his father’s capacities would have compelled hair to grow on Mr. Ooze’s head, especially that it might stand up.
“Humph!” Mr. Nineveh rubbed his chin. “Here’s my address. If he cares to call on me, we might make each other’s fortunes.”
As the train was thundering between the walls of London, Madame Josephine woke up. Drawing out her vanity-case, she renewed her complexion. It was so elaborate an undertaking that it was scarcely completed when they came to a halt in the station. “We’re going to meet again,” she said.
As they watched her drive away in the brougham that was waiting for her, accompanied by the man who never had to work, they could scarcely believe that she was not what she looked at that distance—a girl of little more than twenty.
“A fine old world!” Ruddy stuck his hands in his trousers pockets. “One’s always walkin’ round the corner and findin’ something. It’s the walkin’ round the corner that does it.”
“Seems so,” Teddy assented.
They climbed on a bus and drove back through the evening primroses of street-lamps to Eden Row. After all, in spite of Mr. Yaffon, Mr. Ooze, Hal, and all the other disappointed persons, it must be a fine old world when it allowed boys to be so young.
“Not a word to your mother,” Mr. Sheerug had warned Ruddy after his first interview with Duke Nineveh. “She wouldn’t understand—not yet. Um! Um!”
What he had meant was she would have understood too well. Ruddy communicated this urgent need for secrecy to Teddy. “Can’t make it out—what he’s up to.”
They watched carefully, feeling that whatever Mr. Sheerug was up to, it was something in which they also were concerned.
The first thing they noticed was that a proud-boy look was creeping over him—what Ruddy called an I-ate-the-canary look. For all his fatness he began to bustle. He began to make fusses if the meals weren’t punctual, to insist on his boots being properly blacked and to behave himself in general as though he were head of his household. He spoke vaguely of meetings in the city—meetings which it was vital that he should attend “punkchully.”
“If I’m not punkchull,” he said, “everything may go up the spout.” He didn’t explain what everything was; he was inviting his wife to ask a question.
She knew it—sensible woman. “Meetings in the city,” she thought to herself; “meetings in the city, indeed. Pooh! Men are all babies. If he thinks that he’s going to get me worked up——”
She had shared too many of his ups and downs to allow her excitement to show itself. She denied to herself that she was excited. These little flares of good fortune had deceived her faith too many times. So she treated her Alonzo like a big spoilt child, humoring his whims and feigning to be discreetly unobserving. She forbade the display of curiosity on the part of any of her family. “If you go asking questions,” she said, “you’ll drive him to it.”
She had seen him driven to it before—it was the moment when the dam of piled-up ambitions burst and they scrambled to save what they could from the whirlpool of collapsed speculations. The end of it had usually been a hasty retreat to a less expensive house.
Every day brought some new improvement in his dress. Within a fortnight he was looking exceedingly plump in a frock-coat and top-hat He hadn’t been so gorgeous in a dozen years—not since he had kept a carriage in Kensington. Each morning, shortly after nine, he left Orchid Lodge and marched down Eden Row, swinging his cane with a Mammon-like air of prosperity. When he came back in the evening, as frequently as not he had a flower blazing in his button-hole.
There were times when he strove to revive husbandly gallantries—little acts of forethought and gestures of tenderness. He had grown too fat and had been too long out of practice to do it graciously, and Mrs. Sheerug—she blinked at him with a happiness which tried in vain to conceal itself. They were Rip Van Winkles waking up to an altered world—a world in which a husband need no longer fear his wife, and in which there were more important occupations than talking Cockney to Mr. Ooze as an escape from dullness.
It took just three months for the suppressed expectations of Orchid Lodge to reach their climax. It was reached when Alonzo, of his own accord, without a helping hint or the least sign of necessity, offered his wife money. It happened one September evening, in the room with the French windows which opened into the garden. It was impossible for a natively inquisitive woman to refuse this bait to her curiosity.
“A hund—a hundred pounds! Why, Alonzo!”
Teddy and Ruddy were seated on the steps. At the sound of her gasping cry, they turned to gaze into the shabby comfort of the room. She stood tiptoeing against him, clinging to his hand and scanning his face with her faded eyes. Her gray hair straggled across her wrinkled forehead; her lips trembled. Her weary, worn-out, kindly appearance made her strangely pathetic in the presence of his plump self-assertiveness.
“Struck it,” he said gruffly, almost defiantly. “Going to do a splash. All of us. Um! Um! Those boys helped.”
“Ah!” She shuddered. “Ah, my dear, my splashing days are ended. Even if it’s true, I’m too old for that.”
“Too old!” For the first time that Ruddy could remember, his father took the withered face between his hands. “Too old! Not a bit of it! Going to make a splash, I tell you. Going to be Lord Mayor of London. Going to be a duke, maybe an earl. Beauty forever. Appeals to women’s vanity. Going up like a rocket till I bust. Only I shan’t bust Um! Um! Going up this time never to come down.”
“Never to come down,” she whispered, “never.” The words seemed the sweetest music. She laughed softly to make him think that she did not take him seriously.
They strolled out into the evening redness and sat beside the boys on the steps. Sparrows were rustling in the ivy. The drone of London, like a mill-wheel turning, came to them across the walls. In the garden there was a sense of rest Mr. Sheerug’s portly glory looked out of place and disturbing in its old-fashioned quiet He must have felt that, for he stood up and removed his frock-coat, loosened his waistcoat buttons, and sat down in his shirt-sleeves. He looked less like Mr. Sheerug, the conqueror, who had eaten the canary, and more like the pigeon-flying Mr. Sheerug now.
With unwieldly awkwardness he put his arm about her shoulder and drew her gray head nearer. “Don’t mind, do you?” His voice was husky. “Can’t do it, somehow—never could unless I was making money. Oughtn’t to have married you. Uml Um! Often thought it Dragged you down. Well——”
And then he told them. He began with Duke Nineveh. “He’s a chap who introduces outsiders to something that he says is society. Tells ’em where to buy their clothes and all that. Gets tipped for it. Calls himself a black-and-white artist. Maybe he is—I don’t know: but he’s a man of ideas. His great idea is Madame Josephine—she’s in love with him.”
At mention of Madame Josephine Mrs. Sheerug fluttered. “But Alonzo, she can’t be the same Madame Josephine——”
“The same,” he said.
“The woman who used to dance at——?”
He nodded. “A long time ago.”
“Who caused such a scandal with the Marquis of —————?” She whispered behind her hand. “And was the mistress of——————?” Again she whispered.
“That’s who she is,” he acknowledged. “But don’t you see that all that helps? It’s an advertisement. She’s the best preserved woman of seventy in London.”
“She’s a notorious character,” Mrs. Sheerug said firmly. “Alonzo, you’ll have nothing to do with her.”
His arm slipped from her shoulder. She stood up and reentered the window. Before she vanished, she came back and patted him kindly. “You won’t, Alonzo. You know you won’t.”
The mill-wheel of London droned on, turning and always turning. The sparrows grew silent in the ivy; shadows stole out Soon a light sprang up in the spare-room. They could hear the harp fingered gently; it brought memories of the ghost-bird of romance, beating its wings against the panes, struggling vainly to get out.
“Too righteous,” Mr. Sheerug muttered. “Not a business woman.” And then, as though stoking up his courage, “Won’t I? I shall.”
He heaved him up from the steps and wandered off in the direction of the shrubbery to find comfort with his pigeons.
It was Duke Nineveh, with his knowledge of human vanity, who won Mrs. Sheerug. He spoke to her as an artist to an artist, and asked permission to see her tapestries. He spent an entire afternoon, peering at them through his monocle. Next day he returned.
“Colossal! A shame the world shouldn’t know about them! It’s genius—a lost art recovered. Now, when we’ve built our Beauty Palace, if we could give an exhibition——”
So Beauty Incorporated was launched without Mrs. Sheerug’s opposition. Almost over night the slender white turrets of the Beauty Palace floated up. Madame Josephine began to appear in the West End, looking no more than twenty as seen through the traffic. She drove in a white coach, drawn by white horses, with a powdered coachman and lackeys. The street stopped to watch her. People went to St. James’s to catch a glimpse of her as she flashed down The Mall. She became one of the sights of London and was talked about.
Hints concerning her romantic career crept into the press. Old scandals were remembered, always followed by accounts of her beauty discoveries. Her discoveries, with her portrait for trade-mark, became a part of the stock-in-trade of every chemist: Madame Josephine’s Hair Restorer; Madame Josephine’s Face Cream; Madame Josephine’s Nail Polish. At breakfast when you glanced through your paper, her face gazed out at you, saying, “YOU Can Be Always Young.” It was on the hoardings, on the buses, in your theatre program. It was as impossible to escape as conscience. From morning till night it followed you, always saying, “YOU Can Be Always Young.” The world became self-conscious. It took to examining its complexion. It went to The Beauty Palace out of curiosity, and stayed to spend money. Madame Josephine became the rage: a theme for dinner conversations—a Personage.
The immediate outcome of this was money—more money than Eden Row had ever imagined. Mrs. Sheerug refused to leave Orchid Lodge.
“I’ll help you splash,” she told Alonzo, “but I won’t move out of Orchid Lodge.”
As a compromise, Orchid Lodge was re-decorated in violent colors, and a carriage and pair waited before it. Mrs. Sheerug used her carriage for hunting up invalids that she might dose them with medicines of her own invention. She inclined to the garish in her method of dress, wearing yellow feathers and green plush, as in the old days when Jimmie Boy had dashed to the window to make sketches of her for the faery-godmother. And to him she was a faery-godmother, for she bought his pictures and insisted on having an exhibition of them at The Beauty Palace.
“Ah, my dear,” she would say, crossing her hands, “God sends us poverty that we may be kind when our money comes.”
Was she happy? Teddy wondered. Sometimes he fancied that she coveted the days of careless uncertainty and happy-go-lucky comfort. One of her chief hobbies had been taken from her: it was no longer possible to get into debt And her gifts didn’t mean so much, now that her giving could be endless. It would be absurd for the wife of the great Alonzo Sheerug to produce black bottles from under her mantle and thrust them at people with the information that the contents would “build you up.” She had to send whole cases of wine now, and there wasn’t the same personal pleasure.
She had saved the spare-room from the imagination of the decorators. More than once Teddy caught her there, shuffling about in her woolen slippers and plum-colored dressing-gown. She seemed more natural like that It was so that he loved her best.
For him the success of Beauty Incorporated brought two results: an income and a friend. Mr. Sheerug had rewarded his escapade at Brighton by allotting him shares in the company. The boom increased their value beyond all expectations; he found himself possessed of over three hundred pounds per annum. But the more valuable result was the knowledge of life which he gained from his friendship with Madame Josephine.
To the world in general she was a notorious woman who had sinned splendidly and with discretion. She seemed to deny the advantages of virtue. Was she not beautiful? Was she not young? Hadn’t she wealth? Teddy had come to an age when youth tests the conventions; it was Madame Josephine who answered his doubts on the subject.
The Madame Josephine he knew was a white-haired old lady who liked him to treat her as a grandmother. She would talk to him by the hour about books and dead people, and sometimes about love.
There was an adventure in going to see her, for she only dared to be old in his presence—to the rest of the world it was her profession to be young. As Duke Nineveh was always telling her, appearances had to be kept up.
She had a secret room at the top of her house to which Teddy alone was admitted. The servants were ignorant of what went on there. They invented legends.
He had to speak his name distinctly; then a chair would be pushed back, footsteps would sound, and the key would turn. The moment he was across the threshold, the lock grated behind him. And there, after all these mysteries, was an old lady, sweet-featured and wistful-looking—an old lady who an hour before had been admired for her youth by the London crowds.
Hanging from the ceiling was a cage with a canary. On the sill were flower-boxes. From the window, across trees, one could catch a glimpse of Kensington Gardens and the blown petals of children. It was an old lady’s room, filled with memories. On the walls were faded photographs with spidery signatures; on the table a work-basket; beside the table a rocking chair.
“Here’s where my soul lives,” she said. “The other person, phew!” Her hands opened expressively. “She’s the husk. Those who live to please, must please to live, Teddy. It’s a terrible thing to have to go on shamming when you’re seventy—shamming you’re gay, shamming you’re flippant, shamming you’re wicked. So few things matter when you’re seventy. Money doesn’t.”
She caught the question in his eyes. “Ah, my dear, but when all your life has been lived for adoration, you miss it The poison’s in the blood. At my age one has to pay a long price even for what looks like love.”
That was the nearest she ever came to explaining her relations with Duke Nineveh. She liked to forget him when Teddy was present. It was the ideality of the boy that appealed to her. She wanted to give wisdom to his sentiment, to forewarn his courage and to save him from disappointment It was a strange task for a woman with her record—a woman who had lived garishly, and was remembered for the careers she had ruined. Little by little she drew from him the story of Vashti, and later of Desire.
He looked up at her smiling, trying to treat his confession lightly. “Curious how people come into your life and make your dreams for you.”
She bent over him, taking his hands gently. “Curious! Not curious. People are the most real dreams we have.”
“Yes, but——” He hesitated. “Desire’s not as I remember her any longer. She’s growing up. I wonder what she’s like. If I met her, I might not recognize her. We might pass in the street, my dream and I. And yet——”
He lifted his face to hers. “You know I still think of her—of the price. It’s idiotic, because,” his voice fell, “I know nothing about girls.”
She drew him closer. “D’you know what women need most in this world? Kindness. Good men, like you’ll be,” she seemed to remember, “they’re harsh sometimes. They make women frightened. A good man’s always better than the best woman—that’s a truth that few people own to themselves. If you do find her or any one else, don’t judge—try to understand.” And later, “Never try to be fair to a woman, Teddy; when a good man tries to be fair, he’s unjust.”
From time to time, as they sat together in that locked room, she told him of herself. She gave him glimpses of passion and the despair of its ending. “It doesn’t pay. It doesn’t pay,” was the burden of what she said. One night, it was four years since he had known her, they forgot to turn on the light. Across the ceiling, like a phantom butterfly, the flare from the street-lamps fluttered.
“None of those others that I have told you about were love,” she whispered. “There was a good man in my life once. Whenever you see a woman like me, you may be sure of that. It’s the good men who make us women bad; they expect too much—build their dreams too high. There was a man——” She fell silent “You’re like him. That’s why.”
When he was leaving, she put her arms about him. “When you find her, don’t try to change her. Women long to be trusted. Be content to love.”
For the time being he tried to satisfy his heart-with work. His passion to be famous connected itself with his passion to love. He had an instinct that he must win fame first, and that all the rest would follow.
Much of what Madame Josephine told him about women he applied to Vashti. It made him look on all women with new eyes—the eyes of pity for their frailty. And all these emotions he wove about the figure of Desire.
In the writing of his first book—the book which brought him immediate success, Life Till Twenty-one—was un-cannily conscious of her presence. He would find himself leaving off in a sentence to sketch her face for one of those quaint little marginal drawings. It was as though she had come into the room; by listening intently, he would be able to hear her breathe. Working late at night, he would glance across his shoulder, half expecting to find her. He told himself that she was always standing behind him; why he never saw her was because she dodged in front when he turned his head. It was the old game that she had played in the farmhouse garden, when she had hidden in the bushes at the sound of his coming. He explained these fancies by telling himself that somewhere, out there in the world, she was remembering, and that her thoughts, flying across the distance, had touched him.
It was a golden summer’s evening. In his little temperamental car he was chugging through the Quantock Hills. His car was temperamental chiefly because he had picked it up as a bargain second hand. In his wanderings of the last month he had established a friendship with it which was almost human, as a man does with a piece of machinery when he is lonely.
When the tour had first been planned it had included Ruddy; but at the last moment Ruddy had joined a pierrot-troupe, leaving Teddy to set off by himself. That vacant place at his side reproached him; a two-seater is so obviously meant for two persons. He had told himself faery-tales about how he might fill it. Sometimes he had invented a companion for himself—a girl with gray eyes and bronze-black hair. She seemed especially real to him when night had fallen and the timid shadows of lovers pressed back into the hedges as his lamps discovered them on the road ahead.
For the past month his mind had been ablaze with an uplifted sense of beauty. He had come down from London by lazy stages, halting here a day and there a day to sketch. Every mile of the way the air had been summer-freighted; the freedom of it had got into his blood. Everywhere that he had gone he had encountered new surprises—gray cathedral cities, sleepy villages, the blue sea of Devon; places and things of which he had only heard, and others which he hadn’t known existed. Dreams were materializing and stepping out to meet him. Eden Row, with its recluse atmosphere, was ceasing to be all his world. His emotions gathered themselves up into an urgent longing—to be young, to live intensely, to miss nothing.
To-day he had crossed Exmoor, black with peat and purple with heather, and was proposing to spend the night at Nether Stowey. He had chosen Nether Stowey because Coleridge had lived there. He had sent word to his mother that it was one of the points to which letters could be forwarded. When he had written his name in the hotel book, the proprietress looked up. “Oh, so you’re the gentleman!”
“Why? Have you got such stacks of letters for me?”
“No. A telegram.”
He tore it open and read, “However late, push on to-night to The Pilgrims? Inn, Glastonbury.” The signature was “Madame Josephine.”
He looked to see at what time it had been received. It had arrived at three o’clock; so it had been waiting for him five hours.
“I’m sorry I shan’t need that room,” he said. “How far is it to Glastonbury?”
“About twenty-three miles. I suppose you’ll stay to dinner, sir? It’s being served.”
“I’m afraid not.”
Without loss of time, he cranked up his engine, jumped into his car and started.
“However late, push on to-night to Glastonbury.” Why on earth? What interest could Madame Josephine have in his going to Glastonbury, and why to-night so especially? He had planned to go there to-morrow—to make a dream-day of it, full of memories of King Arthur and reconstructions of chivalrous history and legend. He had intended reading The Idyls of the King that evening to key himself up to the proper pitch of enthusiasm. It seemed entirely too modern and not quite decent, to go racing at the bidding of an unexplained telegram into “The Island Valley of Avilion, where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow.”
As he hummed along through the green-gold country he gave himself up to the mood of enchantment. In the transforming light of the fading sunset it seemed certain that a bend in the road would bring to view champions of The Round Table riding together.
He smiled and shook his head at himself; he hadn’t grown much older since those old days at Ware. It was this sight that he and Desire had expected—the sight of knights in clanking armor and ladies with flowing raiment, sauntering together in a magic world. It had seemed to them that the enraptured land which their hearts-imagined, must lie just a little further beyond the hills and hedges. To find it, it was only necessary to go on and on.
He recalled how he had read to her those legends as they had lain side by side, hidden in tall meadow-grasses from Fanner Joseph. He remembered how they had quarreled when she had said, “I like Sir Launcelot best.”
“But you mustn’t. King Arthur was the good one. If Sir Launcelot hadn’t done wrong, everything would have been happy always.”
“Yes, but if everything had been happy always, there wouldn’t have been any story, Teddy. I know why you don’t like my loving Sir Launcelot: it’s because you’re a King Arthur yourself.”
He laughed. How hurt he had felt at her accusation that he was a proper person!
And there was another memory: how, after playing at knights and ladies, she had tried to make him declare that she was beautiful. “Do you think I’m beautiful, Teddy?” And he, intent on keeping her vanity hungry, “You have beautiful hands.”
He had always promised himself that some day, if they ever met, one of the first places they would visit should be Glastonbury. It would add a last chapter to those chivalrous games which they had played together as children.
Far away in the orchard valley lights were springing up. Out of the misty distance came the lowing of cattle. Like a cowled monk, with peaceful melancholy, the gloaming crept across the meadows.
As he approached the town, it came as something of a shock to notice that its outskirts bore signs of newness. But as he drove into the heart of it, medieval buildings loomed up: gray, night-shrouded towers; stooping houses with leaded windows; the dusky fragrance of ivy, and narrow lanes which turned off into the darkness abruptly. Somewhere in the shadows was Chalice Hill, where the cup of the Last Supper lay buried. Not far distant, within the Abbey walls, the coffin of King Arthur was said to have been found. His imagination thrilled to the antiquity of the legend.
With reluctance he swung his mind back to the present. Pulling up outside The Pilgrims’ Inn, he left his car and entered.
“If you please, has any one been inquiring for me? My name’s Gurney.”
The landlady inspected him through the office-window. She was a kind-faced, motherly woman; the result of her inspection pleased her. She laid down her pen.
“Gurney! No. Not that I remember.”
“Puzzling!” He took her into his confidence, handing her the telegram. “I received that at Nether Stowey. I was going to have stayed there, and should have come on here to-morrow. But you see what it says, ’However late, push on to-night to The Pilgrims’ Inn, Glastonbury.’ So—so I pushed on.” He laughed.
“This Madame Josephine who signs it,” the landlady was turning the telegram over, “d’you know her?”
“Oh, yes. I know her.”
“I asked because—— Well, ladies do play jokes cm gentlemen. And we’ve a lot of actor-folk in Glastonbury at present—larky kind of people. I don’t take much stock in them myself. Shouldn’t think you did by the look of you.”
“I don’t.”
The landlady put her elbows on the desk and crouched her face in her hands. “I didn’t think you would. These people, they’ve been here a week for the Arthurian pageant Some of them stay with me; I’ve seen all I want of ’em. Too free in their manners, that’s what I say. It don’t seem right for girls and men to be so friendly. I wasn’t brought up that way. It puts false notions into girls’ heads, that’s what I say. I suppose you’ve dined already?”
“I haven’t. I hope it won’t put you to too much trouble.”
She led the way through the low-ceilinged hostel, explaining its history as she went. How in the middle-ages it had been the guest-house of the Abbey and the pilgrims had stayed there at the Abbot’s expense. How they had two haunted rooms upstairs, in one of which Anne Boleyn had slept. How the walls were tunneled with secret stairways which led down to subterranean passages. When the meal had been spread she left him, promising to let him know if there were any inquiries.
Odd! All through dinner he kept thinking about it. To have found out where to reach him Madame Josephine must have inconvenienced herself. Probably she’d had to send to Orchid Lodge, and Orchid Lodge had had to send to his mother. She wouldn’t have done all that unless her reason had been important.
He went down to the office. “Has any one called yet?”
“Not yet.”
He glanced at the clock; it was ten. Nobody would come now. He walked out into the High Street to garage his car and to take a stroll before turning in to bed.
The town lay silent. Here and there a faint light, drifting from a street-lamp or from behind a curtained window, streaked the darkness. No people were about. Stars, wheeling high above embattled house-tops, were the only traffic.
“The Island Valley of Avilion, where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow.” The words sang themselves over as he wandered. What if the telegram had been a bait to lure him back into the past? What if the door of forgotten ages had opened to him and closed behind him, as in William Morris’s romance of The Hollow Land?
He played with the fancy, embroidering its extravagance. To-morrow he would awake in the ancient hostel to find that the landlady had changed into a fat old abbot. Pilgrims would be passing to and fro below his window; ladies on palfreys and palmers whose sandaled feet had brought them home from the Holy Land. What if he should remain a captive to the past and never find his way into the present?
He drew up sharply. Wailing music came to him, made by instruments that he had never heard before. It rose into a clamor and sank away sobbing. He tried to follow it, but it seemed to be everywhere and nowhere all in the same moment It lost itself in the echoing of overhanging walls. At last, turning down a passage, he traced it to a barnlike building. As he got there the doors were flung wide and people came pouring out.
He was amused; he had almost been persuaded that he had stumbled on the supernatural. Glancing in, he saw the orchestra gathering up their old-fashioned horns and wind-instruments. The curtain bad been partly raised; slipping from under it the performers, still in costume, were climbing down and mingling with the thinning audience. For the moment the audience seemed the unreal people and the performers the people of his world.
He went out into the darkness and stood back a little from the passage that he might retain the medieval illusion as they passed. He made guesses at their characters. Here came Sir Galahad in silver armor, joking with Merlin, who carried his beard across his arm to prevent it from sweeping the ground. King Arthur, with his sword rattling between his legs, was running to catch up with Sir Launcelot. The girls were more difficult to identify; in their long robes, with their bare arms and plaited hair, there was nothing to distinguish them. As he watched, he saw one with a crown upon her head. The stones in it glinted as she approached. Queen Guinevere, he thought.
She was supple and slight and tall. She walked unhurriedly, with an air of pride, as though she had not yet shaken off her part. A man accompanied her. He was speaking earnestly; she gazed straight before her, taking little notice of what he said. Her hair was brushed back from her forehead to reveal the curve of her ears and the gleam of her shoulders. Her garment was of green and gold, caught in at the waist with a golden girdle; on her feet were golden sandals, which twinkled. The white intensity of her face and throat shone in the darkness. There was an ardency about her that arrested attention.
“It can’t be helped,” she spoke shortly, “so there’s no use talking. I’ve got to get there, whatever happens.”
Teddy followed her down the street. At the sound of her voice his heart had quickened. He wished she would turn her head beneath a lamp that he might see her clearly. Before The Pilgrims’ Inn there was a crowd; when he came up to it she had vanished.
On entering, he found a scene which might have walked out of the brain of Chaucer, so utterly were the costumes in keeping with the hostel. He cast his eyes about, seeking for Queen Guinevere.
As he stood hesitating between pursuing his fancy further or going to bed, the landlady came out from her office. Catching sight of him, she elbowed her way towards him.
“News for me?” he asked.
“Not exactly.” She frowned slightly. “I thought you said you didn’t know any of these actor-folk?”
“I don’t.”
“Well, there’s one of them in there,” pointing back into the office, “who’s got a telegram. She says you’re the man she’s expecting, though she wouldn’t know you from Adam. She says she’s sure you’re the man because you’ve got a car.”
“I don’t think I am. But I’ll go and find out.”
The landlady smiled disapprovingly: “I begin to have my doubts about you, sir.”
In the office the girl who had played the part of Guinevere was standing. The moment he caught her eyes he was certain. Excitement ran through him like a sword.
He felt himself trembling. He wanted to rush forward and claim her. He wanted to go down on his knees to her. Most of all, he wanted to see her recognize him. But she stood there smilingly distant and gracious.
“I’m so sorry to trouble you,” she said. “I’m afraid our introduction’s a trifle unconventional, but I’m in rather a pickle. You see, I want to go to London to-night. In fact, I must go to London, and there are no trains till to-morrow. I have a friend who’s—— But there, read my telegram. It’ll save explan—— to London to-night. In fact, I must go to London, and there are no trains till to-morrow. I have a friend who’s—— But there, read my telegram. It’ll save explanations.”
He took it from her hand and read:
“Dear little D.—Got to sail New York to-morrow. Train leaves Euston at twelve. Have booked your berth. Ask for a man at Pilgrims’ Inn with telegram signed Madame Josephine. Madame Josephine says, if you ask him nicely, he’ll bring you to London in his car. Tell him she suggested. Awful sorry to rush you. Real reason Horace too pressing. My excuse engagement with Freelevy. Love and kisses. Fluffy.”
As he reached the end, she came close and took it from him. He could hear the circlet about her waist jingle; her breath touched him.
“Your hand’s trembling most awfully.” she laughed. “Is it too much of a shock?” And then, before he could answer: “Madame Josephine keeps The Beauty Palace. We go there to be glorified. You know Madame Josephine, don’t you?”
“Yes.” His voice hardly came above a whisper.
“Then, you are the man?”
Was he the man? He wanted to tell her. He had planned this meeting so often—staged it with such wealth of romance and tenderness. And this was how it had happened!
“Then, you are the man?”
Perhaps his nod didn’t carry sufficient enthusiasm. She began to explain and apologize. She made the babies come into her gray eyes, the way she used to as a child when she wanted anything. “I know it’s a lot to ask of a stranger, robbing him of his night’s rest and all. But you see I can’t help it. My friend, Fluffy, is an actress and—— Well, you know what actresses are—she’s very temperamental Of course that part about Freelevy may be true. He’s the great American producer. She wouldn’t tell a downright fib, I’m sure. But the part about Horace is truer; I expect he’s wanting to marry her and—and the only way she can think of escaping him and not hurting his feelings—— You understand what I mean, don’t you? As for me, I have a beautiful mother in America who let me come abroad with Fluffy; so of course I have to go back with her. You see, I’m not an actress yet—I’m only an amateur.” She rounded her eyes and made them very appealing. “If I don’t sail to-morrow, I’ll have to go back unchaperoned, and that—— Well, it wouldn’t be quite proper for a young girl. So you will take me to London to-night, won’t you?”
He burst out laughing. If this wasn’t Desire, it was some one extraordinarily like her—some one who knew how to use the same dear inconsequent coaxing arguments. Who but Desire would urge the propriety of a night ride to London with an unknown man to save the impropriety of an unchaperoned trip across the Atlantic?
She spread her fingers against the comers of her mouth to prevent her lips from smiling. “Why do you laugh? I rather like you when you laugh.”
He wasn’t going to tell her—at least, not yet. “I thought I’d strike a bargain with you. If you’ll promise not to change that dress, I’ll take you.”
“But why this dress?”
He hunched his shoulders. “A whim, perhaps.”
“All right. I’ll go up and pack.”
She walked slowly out of the office, her brows drawn together with thought. At the door she turned:
“You remind me of some one I once knew. I can’t remember who it was. He used to screw up his shoulders just like that.”
Before he could make up his mind whether or not to assist her memory, she was gone.
He had hurried so as not to keep her waiting. By the time he had brought his car round to the hotel the clocks were striking eleven. He throttled down his engine; it didn’t seem worth while shutting it off, since she might appear at any moment. Its muffled throbbing in the shadowy street seemed the panting of his heart How impatient he was to see her! Running up the steps, he peered into the hall.
The landlady approached him with a severe expression. “She sent word for me to tell you she’d be down directly. These—these are strange goings-on. Dangerous vagaries, I call them. It’s none of my business—me not being your mother nor related; but I do hope you know what you’re doing, young gentleman.”
The young gentleman laughed. “We shan’t come to any harm,” he assured her.
The company was breaking up. The vaulted hall and passages echoed with laughter, the jingling of armor and snatches of songs. Knights and ladies were bidding each other extravagant farewells, enacting the gallantries which went with their parts. Men dropped to one knee and pressed their lips to slender hands. Flower faces drooped above them mockingly—and not so mockingly after all, perhaps; for when the Pied Piper of Love makes his music, any heart that is hungry may follow. Those of them who were stopping at the inn caught up their lighted candles. By twos and threes, with backward glances, casting long shadows on the wall, they drifted up the wide carved stairs. Others, who had cheaper quarters, sauntered out into the summer stillness. The porter, like a relentless guardian of morals, stood with his hand upon the door, waiting sourly for the last of them to be gone.
Teddy followed them out. As the girls passed beneath the hotel windows, they dragged on their escorts’ arms, raising their faces and calling one final good-night to their friends who were getting into bed. Heads popped out, and stared down between the stars and the pavement. All kinds of heads. Heads with helmets on. Close-cropped ordinary heads. Heads which floated in a mist of trailing locks. Some one struck up a song; there, in the medieval moonlit street, these romance people danced. Away through the shadows they danced, the booming accompaniment of the men’s voices growing fainter, fainter, fainter, till at last even the clear eagerness of the girls’ singing was lost.
When Teddy turned to reenter the inn, the porter had barred the door. From the steep wall of windows which rose sheer to the stars all the different kinds of heads had been withdrawn. The only sound was the throb-throb-throbbing of the engine like the thump-thump-thumping of his heart.
He sat down on the steps to wait for her. She was a terribly long while in coming. It was nearly half-past eleven. Thirty minutes ago she had sent him word that she would be down “directly.”
“Of course,” he told himself, “there’s no need for hurry. It’s about a hundred and forty miles to London, and we’ve all the night before us.”
He was trying to decide to ring the bell, when the door opened noisily, and the porter stumbled out, bringing her luggage. As he helped Teddy strap it on the back of the car, he answered his questions gruffly: “Doin’! I don’t know wot she’s doin’. Said she’d be down direckly, which means whenever she chooses. The inkinsideration of these actresses beats all. Hurry ’er! Me hurry ’er! No, mister, she’s not the hurryin’ sort; she hurries other folk instead. I don’t know wot the world’s comin’ to, I’m sure. Thank you, sir.” He slipped the half-crown into his pocket “She’s a ’andsome lady; I will say that for ’er.”
And then she appeared, standing framed in the doorway, with the weak light from the hall throwing a golden mist about her. Over her head a hood was drawn, shadowing her features. Her cloak was gathered round her, so that beneath its folds she was recognizable only by her slightness. He felt that, however she had disguised herself, there would have been something in her presence that would have called to him.
“Have I kept you waiting long?” In the old days her apologies had always taken the interrogative form; now, as then, she hurried on, not risking an answer: “You see, I had to say ’good-by’ to everybody. It wouldn’t have been kind to have slipped off and left them. I felt sure you’d understand. And I did send down messages. You’re not cross?”
Cross! She spoke the word caressingly. Her voice sank into a trembling laugh, as though she herself was aware of the absurdity of such a question. Her explanation was totally inadequate, and yet how adorable in its childlike eagerness to conciliate and to avoid unpleasantness!
“Cross! Why, of course not. I was only anxious—a tiny bit afraid that you weren’t coming.”
He sounded so friendly that he convinced her. She sighed contentedly. “Has it seemed very long?”
He looked up from inspecting his lamps. She had come down the steps to the pavement. The porter had entered the hotel; inside he was shooting the last bolt into its socket.
He held his breath. In the moon-washed street after all these years he was alone with her.
“Without you, waiting would always seem long.”
She started. Glanced back across her shoulder. The sounds on the other side of the door had stopped. There was no retreat. Turning to him with girlish dignity, she said: “It’s very kind of you to have offered to help me, but—— I don’t want you to say things like that. We’ll enjoy ourselves much better if we’re sensible.”
He felt a sudden shame, as though she had accused him of taking advantage of her defenselessness. All the things he had been on the point of telling her—he must postpone them. Presently she would remember; her own heart would tell her.
“It was foolish of me,” he said humbly.
She laughed softly and shook back her head. Her hair lay upon her shoulders like a schoolgirl’s. “There now, we understand each other. Why do men always spoil things before they’re started by making stupid love?”
“Do they?”
“Well, don’t they?” She smiled tolerantly. “Let’s be friends. If we’re sensible, we can have such a jolly trip to London—such a lark. No more sentimentals—promise—— Shake hands on it.”
As she held out both her hands, the cloak fell open, revealing her pageant costume. She noticed that his eyes rested on it. “Yes, I kept my bargain—even to the sandals.” The glimmer of her feet peeped out for a second beneath the hem of her skirt. “Now, how about making a start?”
He helped her into the seat which, up to now, had reproached him with its emptiness. He didn’t have to imagine any longer.
He climbed in beside her. “Are you warm?”
“Very comfy.”
“What time do you want to get there? I can get you there by seven or eight, doing twenty an hour—that’s to say, if nothing goes wrong.”
“Do me splendidly. I ought to tell you while I remember: I think this is awfully decent of you.”
“Not decent at all” He hesitated. “It’s not decent because—well, because I always told myself that I’d do something like this some day.”
“Remember your promise.” She held up a warning finger.
“You didn’t let me finish. What I meant to say was that, ever since I was a little kid, I’ve played at rescuing princesses.”
She looked up at him searchingly, then bit her lip to keep back her thoughts. “What a queer game to play!” That was all.
Like a robber bee, seeking honey while the garden of the world slept, the car sped humming through the silver town. Gray, shuttered houses faded upon the darkness like a dream that was spent. They were in the open country now, the white road before them, trees and hedges leaping to attention like lazy sentinels as the lamps flared on them, and throwing themselves down to rest again before the droning of the engine was gone.
“‘The Island Valley of Avilion, where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow.’ Know that?”
She nodded. “It sounds so peaceful, doesn’t it? Like a cold hand laid on an aching forehead. That’s the way those words have felt to me sometimes in the glare and bustle of New York. They’ve come to me when I’ve been walking up Fifth Avenue, and it’s been like a door opening into a green still orchard, somewhere inside my head.”
“You’re sorry to leave it? Why should we leave it? Let’s turn back.”
He slowed down the car.
“Oh, you foolish! I’ve got to catch my boat to-morrow. And besides——” She paused and reflected. “Besides, I’m never so very sorry to leave anything. I’m an odd girl” (The same old phrase, “D’you think I’m an odd child, Teddy?”) “I’m never too sorry to say good-by. I want to push on and on. I’m always looking ahead.”
“To what?”
“Things.” She glanced away into the vagueness of the ghostly meadows. “The kind of things that people do look forward to.”
He wanted to get her to talk about herself—about her past. He could make sure, then, and tell her—tell her everything without frightening her. So he said: “I don’t mean people. I mean girls. What kind of things do girls look forward to?”
Had she shared his hours of remembering? Had it really been her thoughts that had touched him in that little room in Eden Row? He stooped his head nearer to listen. It seemed to him that, above the throbbing of the engine, he could hear the blood dripping in his heart.
She stared into his eyes with her old suspicion—the veiled stare, half hostile, which a girl gives a man when she fears that he is going to kiss her.
“Girls look forward to—what kind of things?” she echoed. “I can’t tell. The same kind of things that men look forward to, I expect. The surprise things, and—yes, the excitements, most of all.”
“Like our meeting—it was a surprise thing, wasn’t it?”
“I suppose so.” She slipped back her cloak from her white shoulders. “Heaps of things are surprise things like that.”
It was as though she had said, “This meeting of ours—it’s of no importance.” He loved her for the way she was treating him. He knew now why she had dared to risk herself with a man who, so far as her knowledge went, was a complete stranger.
They both fell silent. He felt that there was only one thing that he could talk about, and he didn’t know when or where to start. He wanted above all things to say nothing only to take her in his arms; to kiss her lips, her hair, her hands and to kneel to the little sandaled feet that peeped out from below her queenly robe. He hardly dared to look at her lest, then and there, he should leave the wheel and do it. All that his heart asked was to be allowed to touch and reverence her.
As he stared between the rushing eyes of the car, watching the road ahead, his imagination painted pictures on the darkness. He saw her lifting her arms about his neck. He saw her lying close against his breast. He heard her whispering broken phrases—words which said so much by leaving so much unsaid. But whenever he stole a glance at her, he saw her gray eyes closed like a statue’s and her white hands folded.
He was wasting time—it would so soon be morning. She was going to America. She must not go, and yet he was helping her. If he could only find words to tell her. He had never thought it would be so difficult. Ah, but then he had imagined a child-Desire, just grown a little taller. But this Desire was different—so self-possessed and calm, with so many new interests and unknown friends estranging her from the faery-Desire of the farmhouse garden.
They passed through Wells, where the cathedral lay like a gigantic coffin beneath the stars. Having panted up the steep ascent beyond the town, they commenced the twenty-mile downhill run to Bath.
He heard a stirring beside him. Her eyes were open, quite near to his and shining with friendliness.
“What’s the matter? We’ve both gone silent.”
“I thought you were tired, so I didn’t disturb you.”
“Tired! Perhaps I was. But I’m all right now. Isn’t it magic with all the stars, and the mist and the being away from every one? Don’t you want to smoke? Here, I’ll hold the wheel while you light a cigarette. Yes, I know how.”
She leant across him to do it, her shoulder resting against his arm. The wind of their going fluttered her hair against his cheek. For a moment he was possessed with a mad longing to crush her to him.
“Haven’t you a match?”
She seemed utterly unconscious of her power to charm; yet instinctively she used it.
“All right?” she asked. “I wonder whether you’d mind——” Her finger went up to her mouth and her gray eyes coaxed him.
“I shouldn’t mind anything.”
She shook her head emphatically. “No. I won’t do it. People remember first impressions. You’d think me fast.”
“I shouldn’t I couldn’t ever think that.”
“Are you sure? Well, may I——?” She made a gesture imitative of withdrawing a cigarette from her lips. “I don’t smoke often—only when I feel like it. And, oh, I do feel so happy to-night.”
She lit her cigarette from his, steadying herself with her hand on his shoulder. Then she lay back, staring up at the fleecy sky where the moon tipped clouds to a silver glory. She began to sing softly between her puffs:
The night has a thousand eyes,
And the day but one;
Yet the light of a whole world dies
With the dying sun.”
She sang the same verse over three times, pausing between each singing as if she were repeating a question.
“Don’t you know the second verse?” he asked unsteadily.
“Yes, I know it.”
“Won’t you sing it? The whole meaning of life and everything is in the last two Unes.”
“D’you really want me to? I don’t care for it so much because it’s about love. I don’t think love ever made anybody happy.”
For a moment he was tempted to argue this heresy. “But sing it,” he urged.
In a soft sleepy voice she sang:
“The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one;
Yet the light of a whole world dies
When love is done.”
He waited for her to repeat it When she remained silent, he stopped the car. She turned to him lazily: “Something gone wrong with the engine?”
He was certain she knew what had gone wrong, and was equally certain that she was wilfully pretending to misunderstand him. Far below in the valley, like a faeryring, the lights of Bath winked and twinkled. The silence, after the sound of their going, breathed across the country like a prolonged sighing. How should he tell her? How did men speak to the women they loved? He turned aside from his purpose and procrastinated. “Sing it again,” he pleaded, “the last verse. Now, that everything’s quiet.”
“No.” She sat up determinedly. “It’s very beautiful; especially that part about light dying when love is done. But it isn’t true. People love heaps of times, and each new time they get more sensible. It’s like climbing a ladder: you see more as you go higher. Besides, that last verse makes me cry.”
“Love makes people happy.” His voice was low and trembling. “You shouldn’t pretend to be a cynic. You’re too beautiful.”
“Oh, well, perhaps you are right, but——” She threw away her cigarette. “Please be nice. You don’t know what things I’ve had done to me to make me talk like that” She touched him on the arm ever so lightly: “When we’re traveling, we talk so much better. Hadn’t we better be going?” And then, when they were again humming down the long hill, with the white lamps scything the shadows: “This really is fun. It’ll be something to remember.”
“Something to talk about together,” he said.
She cuddled herself down into the seat. “Not much time for that with me sailing for America. But you’ve not told me what you think of my telegram. Wasn’t it a quaint, jumpy message? That’s just like Fluffy to decide a problem in five minutes that other people would take five months over. If she finds that anything’s worrying her, she moves away from it This Horace, he’s Horace Overbridge, the playwright, and he’s in love with her. Ever since we landed in April they’ve been going about together, having motor-trips into the country and picnics on the river, and—oh, so many good times. Of course I’ve been there, too, to take care of her. But the trouble is he wants to marry her and, if he did, he’d never let her do what she likes. He can’t understand that it means just as much to her to be an actress as it does to him to be a playwright Men aren’t very understanding. Of course, while they’re not even engaged, he raves about her acting and helps her all he can. But she knows perfectly well that all that would end with marriage. And then she doesn’t love him. So you see——”
“But you said she’d let him take her about and give her good times.”
“Why, certainly. If a man chooses to do that it’s his own affair. And then Fluffy’s very dear and beautiful, and she wouldn’t let many men be in love with her. You did sound shocked when you said ‘But!’”
“I was thinking that she hadn’t played fair. She must have led him on. You don’t think that’s fair, do you?”
“Fair!” She pursed her lips. “He enjoyed himself while it lasted, and it’s his own fault if he’s spoilt it.” She threw back her head and trilled gayly. “Oh, I can see her stamping her little foot and saying, ’No. No. No, Horace.’ And then, I expect, she jumped straight into a cab and booked our berths on the very first ship that was sailing. You—you don’t approve of her?”
“I don’t know her. It wasn’t very thoughtful of her to give you such short notice.”
“But if I don’t mind—you see, it’s my business.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Then I have no right to mind. But I’m wondering where you’d have been if I hadn’t turned up.”
“I! Oh, I’d have hired a car, I suppose, and Fluffy’d have had to pay for it, or Horace, or somebody.—I wish I could remember who it was shrugged his shoulders the way you do.”
“Perhaps it was——”
He glanced at her and broke off. This didn’t seem the propitious time to assist her memory. She was frowning. He had displeased her. The flippancy of Fluffy’s way of loving had cheapened all passion for the moment.
They were coming into Bath, with its narrow streets and wide spaces, its fluted columns and Georgian mansions.
“When we get into the country on the other side,” he thought, “I’ll tell her.”
But on the other side he found that her eyes were shut She lay curled up, with her child’s face turned towards him and her cheek pillowed against her hand.
“Desire,” he whispered. “Desire.”
She sighed, but her eyes did not open.
“It’s Teddy. Don’t you remember?”
She did not stir.
Very tenderly, lest he should wake her, he tucked her cloak closer, and buttoned it across her breast. By degrees he pulled the hood up over her ears and forehead. He stooped to kiss her, but drew back at the last moment To kiss her, sleeping, seemed too much like theft; “I love you, dearest,” he whispered. “I love you.”
She made no answer.
He drove on, dreaming, through the summer night.
Stars were weakening in their shining. He wished she would wake up. It was still night, but almost imperceptibly a paleness was spreading. The sky looked mottled. As he passed through an anonymous, shrouded village a clock was striking. One, two, three! If he kept up this pace, they would be in London, at the latest, by seven.
He began to calculate his respite. The boat-train left Euston at noon; if she allowed him to stay with her to the very last moment, he had—how much? About nine hours more of her company.
But probably she wouldn’t let him stay with her. She’d have packing to do. This Fluffy person would want to carry her off and gossip about Horace—what he had said to her and what she had said to him, and how thoroughly justified she was in her treatment of him. And so—he widened his mouth bitterly—and so she would blow out of his life like thistledown. This splendid meeting, which had been the dream of his boyhood, would be wasted—cold-shouldered into oblivion by. trivialities.
In his desperation he invented a dozen mad schemes for detaining her. It was on the cards that his car might break down. Unfortunately it showed every healthy sign of living beyond its reputation. Well, if it didn’t do it voluntarily, he might help it—might lose a spark-plug or loosen something. He might, but it wasn’t in him to do it. The moment he met her truthful gray eyes he’d be sure to shrive his conscience—then she’d detest him. No, if he was going to be a young Lochinvar, he had far better play the game boldly—swing off into side-roads and, when she wakened, explain to her laughingly: “You won’t catch your boat now, little Desire. I’ve made you lose it on purpose because—because I love you.”
Humph! And she’d be amiable, wouldn’t she? Some men might be able to carry that off. He couldn’t. He’d feel a cur; he’d look it. So he drove on through the darkness, cursing at every new mile-stone because it brought him nearer to the hour of parting.
He wished to heaven she would wake up. While he fumed and fretted, he built topply air-castles. Couldn’t he marry her—propose clean off the bat and get it over? Such things had happened. The idea allured him. He began to reckon his finances to see whether he could afford it. He had saved seven hundred pounds from his Beauty Incorporated dividends; every year there would be three hundred more. Then he had his future. His work was in demand. Several commissions had been offered him. No fiction-writer since Du Maurier, so the critics told him, had illustrated his own stories quite so happily. His next book was going to make him famous—he was sure of it. Oh, yes, so far as money went, he was eligible.
From somewhere at the back of his mind a wise voice kept warning: “You have to live all your life with a woman; marrying’s the least part of marriage. Go slowly. How d’you know that she isn’t another Fluffy?”
It was just as though Mrs. Sheerug were talking. He argued angrily against her disillusions. “But she’s not selfish like Vashti; and, anyway, you weren’t fair to Vashti. You wouldn’t believe that she was good—you wouldn’t even let Hal believe it. That was why he lost her.”
Then Madame Josephine took a hand: “When you find her, don’t try to change her. Women long to be trusted. Be content to love.”
He gasped. What a lot Madame Josephine knew about men and women. He was doing what all men did—and he had promised himself so faithfully to be the exception. Already he was wanting to change Desire: wanting to make her give up such friends as Fluffy; wishing she didn’t smoke cigarettes, though so long as she wasn’t married to him he found it rather fascinating; feeling shocked that she had trusted a strange man so carelessly, though, when he happened to be her chance-selected companion, he had been glad to profit by her carelessness.
And then—he didn’t like to own it—he felt piqued by her lack of curiosity. She had taken him so quietly for granted. She hadn’t asked who he was, or why he, of all men, had been sent to her rescue. Any man would have done, provided he had had a car. It was A Man with A Car that she had wanted. When the emergency was ended and he had served his purpose, she would dismiss him with a polite “Thank you,” and put him out of her memory. Thistledown—that was what she was.
He bent over her. Still sleeping! Her red lips were parted, the glint of her white teeth showing. One hand was beneath her cheek, the other against her breast like a crumpled petal. Below her eyes the long lashes made shadows. How sweet she was, how fragile, how trusting—how like the child-Desire who had snuggled into his arms in the woodland! With a sudden revulsion he despised his fault-finding. Chivalry and tenderness leapt up. He must make it a law with himself to believe the highest of her, whatever happened or had happened.
He longed to waken her. He imagined how her eyes would tremble on him if she awoke to find him bent above her hands. But would they? Because he wasn’t sure, he cursed his inherited reticence.
Out of the east, driving his misty sheep before him, the shepherd of the dawn came walking. Like a mischievous dog, with his red tongue lolling, the sun sprang up and scattered the flock through many pastures.
Still she slept.
Outside Reading the engine went wrong. For a moment he hoped—— But, no, it was nothing serious. In making adjustments he made much more noise than was necessary. She did not rouse.
Nearly five o’clock! Other people would claim her in two hours. For the next forty minutes that thought, that other people would claim her, provided him with exquisite torture. Some of those other people would be men—how could any man be near her without loving her?
He reached Maidenhead and came to the bridge—came to the river winding like a silver pathway between nose-gays of gayly painted houseboats.
“Ho-ho!”
Jamming on the brakes in the middle of the bridge, he brought the car to a halt. Her hand fluttered up to her mouth in a pretty pretense at checking the yawn. She rubbed her eyes. “Morning! Didn’t I choose a good place to wake up? Where are we?” She sat upright. “My, but I am cramped. And, oh, look at my dress! It’ll embarrass you most horribly when we get to London. The police’ll think you’re eloping with a faery.”
He crouched above the wheel, clutching it tightly, fearing what he might do with his hands. Her casual cheerfulness stifled his words. It was like a blow across his lips. What he had intended to say was so serious. His eyes felt hot. He had a vision of himself as a wild unkempt being, almost primeval, who struggled and panted. He was filled with a sickening sense of self-despising and dreaded lest at any moment he might hear her laughing.
“What a shame!” She stroked his sleeve gently. Her voice was concerned. “I am a little beast. You’ve been at it all night while I’ve been——” She rippled into laughter. “Do tell me whether I snored. Why don’t you say something? You’ll get me frightened; you look most awfully strange and funny.” And then, softly: “Poor you! You’re very tired.”
He was like a man turned to stone. She listened for any sound of footsteps; she might need help. Except for the sunshine, the lapping of the river and the careless singing of birds, the whole world was empty.
She swept the hair back from her forehead and gazed away from him. She mustn’t let him know that he’d upset her.
“The river! Isn’t it splendid? And all the little curly mists. Why, this must be Maidenhead. Yes, there’s the place where we hired the boat when I came here with Horace and Fluffy. I hate to leave it, but—— We’d better be getting on to London, hadn’t we?”
He didn’t answer. Slowly she turned and regarded him. Was he sulky, or ill, or——?
“I’m doing my best to be pleasant.” There was a hint of tears in the way she said it. “You won’t let me help you—won’t tell me what’s the matter. I suppose that’s because I look untidy and ugly.”
“Princess!”
Tremblingly he seized her hands. She drew back from him: “Oh, please! You’re hurting.”
His eyes had touched hers for a second, penetrating their cloudiness. He let her slip from his grasp. “I’m sorry. I thought—I thought you were some one else.”
He was on the point of starting when she rose and jumped out
“I’m stiff. Let’s say ’Good-by’ to the dear old Thames. It won’t take a minute.” And then, over her shoulder, as she leant across the parapet: “You thought I was some one else. Who knows? Perhaps I am.”
All that he could see of her was her slight figure and the back of her pretty head. He went and stood near her, within arm-stretch.
Without looking at him she asked a question. “Why do you beat about the bush? Last night you had something on your mind that you wouldn’t tell. This morning it’s worse. What makes you so timid? I’m only a girl.”
“Because——”
“Go on.”
“Because it’s something that would offend you if you weren’t——”
She shook her head. “I’m never offended. I’m too understanding. Perhaps—— Were you fond of this some one?”
“Fond, I?” The river grew blurred “It was years ago. I was a boy and she was only a little girl. It’s like a story—like some one I read about, and then went out to try and discover.”
A market-cart rumbled across the bridge, mountain-high with vegetables. When the sound of its going had died out, she moved closer.
“I knew a boy once who called me ’Princess.’ He used to tell me—it was a queer, dear thing to tell me—he used to tell me that the babies came into my eyes when I was happy. But that was only when I’d been awfully nice to him.” When he stared at her, she nodded. “Really. He did. I’m not joking.”
How long had she recognized him? Had she been cruel on purpose? Had she kept him on tenter-hooks for her own diversion? He laughed softly. It wasn’t quite the rushing together of two souls that imagination had painted. And yet, there were compensations: the sleeping houses with their blinds discreetly lowered; the sparkling river; the spray of plunging clouds; on the bridge, suspended between sky and river, this pale queenly sprite of a girl. The golden girdle about her waist jingled. He took no notice the first time and the second; but the third it seemed a challenge. He reached out his arm.
Tossing back her hair, she slipped from him. “Not allowed. You go too fast; you were too slow at first. Why on earth didn’t you tell me last night, instead of—— Think what a splendid time we might have had. And now we’ve only a few hours.”
He seized her hands and held them, palm to palm. This time she made no complaint that he hurt. “You’re not going.” He was breathing quickly. “You’re never going unless——”
Her half-closed eyes mocked him with their old impishness. “But you mustn’t hold me like that. It isn’t done in the best families—not in public, anyway—even by the oldest friends.”
She broke from him and stepped into the car. “Let’s be nice to each other. We haven’t been very nice yet.”
Very nice! He’d sat up all night and tossed his holiday plans to the winds for her. He grinned to himself as he cranked the engine. This was the same Desire with a vengeance—the old Desire who had tried to make people ask pardon when she was the offender.
They were traveling again. His hands were occupied; he could make love to her with nothing more alarming than words. She felt safe to lower her defenses.
“You were just a little judging last night.”
“Was I?”
“Just a little. About Fluffy. You don’t even know her We were stupid to quarrel.”
“It wasn’t as bad as that.”
“It was. You were, oh, so extremely righteous. But I’d have been just as angry in your defense, or any one else’s whom I liked. I make a loyal little friend.”
“Would you truly quarrel in my defense?”
She patted his hand where it rested on the wheel “Of course I would. But last night you hurt me so much that—— I wonder if I dare tell you. You see, it hurt all the more because we’d only just met. I pretended——”
He finished her sentence: “To be asleep.”
She bit her lip. “Yes.”
“Then you heard?”
“Heard what?”
“What I said when I buttoned your cloak about you?” She made her eyes innocently wide. “Did you do that? That was kind.”
She was dodging him. He knew it; yet he wondered. Had she heard him whisper that he loved her? If she had—— He glanced sideways; all he saw was the gleam of her throat through her blowy hair.
His mind went back across the years. How much he had lost of her—a child then, a woman now! If they were to bridge the gulf, it would be wiser to start with memories.
“I found what you’d written on the window—found it next morning, after you’d left.”
“Did I write anything? It’s so long ago. How wonderful that you should have remembered!”
“Not wonderful at all. If you’d meant it, you’d remember.”
She had gone too far with her evasions. Snuggling closer, their shoulders touching, she bent across him till their eyes met.
“I did mean it then. But you shouldn’t expect a girl to own it. I can prove to you that I meant it. I wrote, ’I love you,’ and then, lower down, ’I love you.’ I’ve—I’ve often thought about you, and about—— What times we had! D’you remember the bird-catcher and Bones? Poor Bones! How jealous you were of him, and I expect he’s dead.” She laughed: “So you needn’t be jealous any longer. And d’you remember how I would bathe? Shocking, wasn’t it? I thought it would change me from a girl to a boy. And how I called you King Arthur once, and made you angry? I think—— No, you won’t like me to say that.”
He urged her.
“I think you’re still a King Arthur or else—you wouldn’t have objected to Fluffy, and you wouldn’t have made such a mess about recognizing me.”
Stung by the old taunt he grew reckless. “I did tell you. You heard what I said, but you tricked me by pretending you were sleeping.”
“A Sir Launcelot wouldn’t have, been put off by pretense. He’d have shaken me by the shoulders. Oh, don’t look hurt. Let’s talk of something else. What d’you suppose I’ve been doing with myself?”
As they drove through the morning country, between hedges cool with dew and fragrant with opening flowers, she told him.
“After my father had kidnaped me” (so she knew that Hal was her father!) “my beautiful mother took me to America. Sometimes we traveled in Europe, but she was afraid to bring me to England so long as I was little. This summer’s the first time I’ve been back. She let me come with Fluffy. I’m going to be an actress—going to start next fall in New York, I expect, if my mother allows me. Fluffy’s promised to help. She’s a star. Janice Audrey’s her real name. You must have heard of her. No! Oh, well, she’s quite famous, even if you haven’t. So you see why it’s so important for me to sail with her.”
“You’re not going to sail with her.”
“I am.” She caught her breath and gazed at him wonderingly. “How foolish of you! That’s why we’ve driven all night, and——”
“You’re not going to now.”
She threw herself back in the seat a little contemptuously. “It’s nonsense to discuss it. I’d like to know what makes you say it.”
“Because——- It’s difficult to tell you. Because I couldn’t bear to lose you the moment we’ve met. I don’t think—well, of course, you can’t understand what you’ve been in my life. Don’t laugh, Desire; I’m not flirting—not exaggerating. I’ve always believed that I’d find you. I’ve lived for that. I’ve worked, and tried to be famous and worthy so that—so that you’d like me. I had an idea that somewhere, far out in the world, you were thinking of me and waiting for me.” He glanced at her shyly. “Were you?”
She was sitting motionless, staring ahead.
“Were you?”
Tears came into her eyes. “It’s very beautiful—what you’ve told me. It makes me feel—— Oh, I don’t know—that I wish I were better. You see, you’ve thought of me as a dream-person, as some one very wonderful. I’m only a reality—an ordinary girl with a little cleverness, who wants to be an actress. Yes, I’ve thought about you sometimes. Mother and I have often talked about you—but not in the way you mean, I expect.”
He thrilled. She had thought about him. She owned it “You couldn’t be better than you are,” he whispered.
She shook her head. “You haven’t known me long enough. I’m disappointing.”
He smiled incredulously.
“But I am,” she pouted, with a touch of petulance. “Then I’ll have to know you long enough. You’ll have to give me the chance to be disillusioned; that’s only fair. All the while you were sleeping I was planning a way to keep you from going. At first I hoped the car would break down. When it didn’t, I was tempted to loosen something so that we’d get stuck on the road. Not at all a King Arthur trick, that! But I couldn’t bring myself to do it after you’d trusted me. Then I thought I’d run off with you—let you wake up in Devon, miles from any railway, with no time to get back. Somehow, from what I remembered of you, I didn’t think that that would make you pleasant. Then I had a mad notion.”
“What was it?”
“You won’t laugh at me?”
“Honest Injun. I promise.”
“I thought I’d propose to you the moment you woke and we’d get married.”
“You thought of that all by your little self!” Her voice rose in a clear carol of music. “You quaint, funny person.” Catching her humor, he joined in her laughing. “It seemed tremendously possible while you slept. I even reckoned up my bank-account. But I’ve a real scheme now. When we ran away from Fanner Joseph, I was going to take you to my mother. D’you remember?”
“Well?”
“Let’s pick up our adventure where we dropped it. I’ll take you to her.”
“Dreamer! What about my sailing, and my mother waiting for me, and Fluffy?”
“Oh, hang Fluffy! She’s always intruding.”
“That’s not kind. Besides, I don’t want Fluffy hanged. If she were, she couldn’t help me to be an actress.”
“But you’re not going to be an actress. I’d hate to think of you being stared at by any one who could pay the money. An actress marries the public, but you—— Look here, I’m serious.”
“You think you are. I never met any one like you. You weave magic cloaks in your imagination and try to make live people wear them. If the magic cloaks don’t fit, you’ll be angry. So don’t weave one for me; I warn you. What’s the time? Then in less than seven hours I sail for America.”
He felt like a kite, straining toward the clouds, which the hand of a child was dragging down to earth. Her voice uttered prose, but her eyes smiled poetry. She seemed to be repeating disenchanted phrases which she had borrowed without comprehending. Every time he looked at her she inspired him to flights; but she refused to follow him herself. Because of that he fell silent.
Streets commenced. The smoke of freshly kindled fires boiled and bubbled against the sky. Frowsy maids knelt whitening doorsteps, as though saying their prayers. Blinds shot up at second-story windows. The world was getting dressed. It was the hour when dreams ended.
Desire drew her cloak closer, hiding the green and gold of her romance attire.
“I didn’t mean to be horrid. Don’t think that I don’t appreciate——”
Whatever it was she said was lost in the clatter of a passing tram.
“You weren’t horrid.” He spoke quietly. “Even if you had been, I deserved it. I’ve been,” he hesitated and shrugged his shoulders expressively, “just a little mad. What’s the address? Where am I to drive you?”
They had entered Regent’s Park. For a moment the spell of the country returned. In fields, beyond the canal, sheep were grazing.
“Can’t we go more slowly?” She touched his arm gently.
“We can. But, if we do, I’ll have more time to make a fool of myself, and I’ve done that pretty thoroughly.”
“I don’t think so.”
“But I have and I owe you an apology. You see, all my life you’ve been an inspiration. I’ve imagined you so intensely that I couldn’t treat you politely as a stranger—as what you call a ’real’ person.”
Her face trembled. All the mischief had gone out of it. Her hands moved distressfully as though they wanted to caress him, but didn’t dare. She crouched her chin against her shoulder and gazed away through the sun and shadows of the park.
“I don’t want you to be polite to me,” she faltered. “I don’t think you understand how difficult it is to be a girl. We neither of us know quite what we want.” She looked at him wistfully. “Disappointed in me already! Didn’t I warn you? And yet, if you’d take the trouble to know me, you’d find that I’m not—not so bad and heartless.”
“Little Desire, I never thought you were bad and heartless—never for one moment.”
The babies came into her eyes and her finger went childishly to her mouth. “No, you wouldn’t have the right to; but I’m ever so much nicer than you suspect.”
He slowed down the engine. His face had gone white beneath its tan. They were both stirred; they seemed to listen to the beating of each other’s heart “Give me another chance,” he urged unsteadily.
“But how? I must sail.” She gazed at him forlornly. “Here we are. You were going past it.”
They drew up before a tall, buff-colored house, standing in a terrace. As though glad to escape from their emotional suspense, she jumped out the moment they had stopped, ran up the steps and rang the bell. While she waited for her ring to be answered, she kept her back towards him. The door was opened by a maid in a white cap and apron.
“Hulloa, Ethel! So you see I’ve got back. How’s Miss Janice? Busy packing?”
“Still in bed, Miss Desire. I was just going up to help her dress.”
“Out last night with Mr. Horace?”
“Yes. He’s to be here to breakfast He’s going to the station to see you off.”
“All right. I’ll be in in a moment You needn’t stop.”
She came tripping down the steps to Teddy. He had got out of the car and had been standing watching her. He had feared that she would glance across her shoulder and dismiss him with a nod.
She rested her hand upon his arm and looked up at him timidly with an expression that was more than pity. The leaves of the park fluttered and the flakes of sunlight fell.
“If I wasn’t going——” The rumble of London shook the heavy summer stillness, hinting at adventures awaiting their exploring. “If only I wasn’t going—— I’m beginning to like you most awfully, the way I did once when—— But I must go. I can’t help it You’ll stay to breakfast, won’t you? Then we can drive to the station together.”
“I’d like to. But would they like it?”
“Who? Fluffy and Horace? I don’t suppose so.”
“Then breakfast with me somewhere else?”
She played with the temptation, raising his expectations. Then, “No. I’ve too much to do—packing and all sorts of things. Perhaps you’re right We’d be awkward with each other before them. We’d better say ’Good-by’ now.”
But she didn’t say it. Her hand still rested on his arm and the gold-green leaves of the park fluttered.
“I can’t let you go like this,” he whispered hoarsely.
“No. I know it. But what can we do? Poor you! I’m so sorry.”
Her mood changed swiftly. “Oh, how stupid we are! Give me a pencil and some paper. Now put your foot on the step of the car and make a table for me.”
As she stooped to his knee to write, her hair fell back, exposing the whiteness of her neck. The familiarity with which she was filling these last moments sent all his dreams soaring. The daintiness, the slimness, the elfin beauty of her quickened his longing. His instinct told him that she was hoping that he would kiss her; but he guessed that, if he did, she would repulse him. “You go too fast for me,” she had said. Once again his imagination wove a magic garment and flung it about her shoulders. There was no one like her. She was called Desire because she was desired. If love could compel love, she should come into his life. He vowed to himself that he would win her.
“There.”
As he took the paper from her, their fingers touched and clung together. “What’s this? Your New York address? You mean that we can write to each other?”
Her eyes mocked his trouble with tenderness. “That wasn’t what I meant.”
“Then what?”
“That you’ll know where to find me when you come to America.”
“But I can’t I——”
She broke from him and ran up the steps. As she crossed the threshold she let her cloak slip from her. He saw again for one fleeting moment her sandaled feet and her pageant costume.
The door was closing. Before it shut she kissed the tips of her fingers to him.
“You can if you really care.”
He eyed the windows furtively, hoping to catch her peering out. He commenced to tinker with his engine to give himself an excuse for delaying. Why hadn’t he accepted her breakfast invitation? Without her he felt utterly desolate.
Perhaps, if he stayed there long enough, she would come to him. The door would open and he would hear her saying shyly, “Ha! So it did break down!” Of course the sensible thing to do would be to walk boldly up the steps and ask for her. But love prefers strategy.
A man came strolling along the terrace. He was in gray flannels, wore a straw hat and was swinging a cane jauntily. He had a distinct waist-line and humorous blue eyes. He was the kind of man who keeps a valet.
“Hulloa! Something wrong?”
Teddy unstooped his shoulders. “Nothing much. Nothing that I can’t put right.”
“Well, I’m going in here.” The man glanced across his shoulder at the house. “If it’s water you want or anything like that, or if you’d care to use the phone——”
Teddy flushed scarlet beneath his tan. So this cheerful looking person was Horace who, cooperating with Fluffy, had set an example that had cheapened all love’s values?
“I won’t trouble you. Thanks all the same.”
Had he dared, he would have accepted the proffered assistance. But Desire would guess; they all would guess that he had acted a lie to gain an entrance. Contempt for the foolishness of his situation made him hurry. The car made a miraculous recovery—so miraculous that the blue eyes twinkled with dawning knowledge.
“Come a long way to judge from the dust! From Glastonbury, perhaps?”
Teddy jumped to the seat and seized the wheel. “Yes, from Glastonbury,” he said hastily.
As he drove away he muttered, “Played me like a trout! He’s no cause to laugh when he’s been refused himself.”
From the end of the terrace, he glanced back. The man, with leisurely self-possession, was entering the house. He felt for him the impotent envy that Dives in torment felt, when he saw Lazarus lying on Abraham’s bosom. He tried to jeer himself out of his melancholy. “I’m very young,” he kept saying. But when he imagined the party of three at breakfast, he could have wept.
Now that she had vanished, he remembered only her allurement. Her faults became attractions: her coldness was modesty; her defense of Fluffy, loyalty; her unreasonable request that he should come to America, love. What girl would expect a man to do that unless she loved him?
The reality of his predicament began to grow upon him. This wasn’t a romance or a dream he had invented; it had happened.
In a shadowed spot, overlooking the canal, he halted the car. He must think matters out—must get a grip on himself before he went further. Water-carts were going up and down. Well-groomed men were walking briskly through the park on their way to business. Boys and girls on bicycles passed him, going out by way of Hampstead for a day in the country. The absolute normality of life, its level orderliness, thrust itself upon him. He looked at the sedate rows of houses, showing up substantially behind sun-drenched branches. He saw their window-boxes, their whitened doorsteps, their general appearance of permanency. The men who lived in those houses wouldn’t say to a girl, “I love you,” in the first half-dozen hours of acquaintance. But neither would the girls say to a seven-hour-old lover, “Come to America”; they wouldn’t even say, “Run down to Southend,” for fear of being thought forward.
How distorted the views seemed to him now that he had held on the journey up from Glastonbury! They were the result of moonlight and of the pageant emotions stirred by a medieval world. How preposterously he had acted!
He tried to put himself in Desire’s place that he might judge her fairly. Irresponsible friends send her a telegram, saying that a man is coming to fetch her. Of course she believes that the man is to be trusted; but the first thing he does is to make love. In spite of that, she has to go with him; he is her one chance of getting to London. He at once commences to take advantage of her; she gets frightened and pretends to go to sleep in order to escape him. In the morning she discovers that he’s an old friend, but there’s too little time to replace the bad impression. At the last moment she feels sorry for him—begins to feel that she really does care for him; so she says the only thing possible under the circumstances, “Come to America.”
Obviously she wasn’t going to give herself away all at once. In that she had been wise, for, though he had wanted her to, he knew that if she had, she would have lowered her value.
But he wished she had shown more curiosity. She’d talked all about herself and hadn’t asked him a single question. She hadn’t even called him by his name—not once.
Then the cloud of his depression lifted. The truth came home to him in a flash: all these complaints and this unhappiness were proofs positive that at last he was in love. The splendor of the thought thrilled him—in love. The curtain had gone up. His long period of lonely waiting was ended. For him the greatest drama that two souls can stage had begun. Whither it would lead he could not guess. Everything was a blank except the present, and that was filled with an aching happiness. She was going from him. Already she was out of sight and sound; in a few hours he would be cut off from all communication with her. Yet he was happy in the knowledge that, however uncertain he might be of her, he belonged to her irrevocably. He longed to give himself to her service in complete self-surrender. His work, his ambitions, everything he was or could be, must be a gift for her. But how to make her understand this, while there was yet time?
He drove out of the park, passing by her house. Of her there was no sign. He wondered what they were doing in there. Was the man with the blue eyes taking his place and helping to strap her trunks? Or was he making love to Fluffy, while Desire looked on wistfully and wished—wished what he himself was wishing?
“You were a little judging?”
Yes, he had been judging. It had all taken place so differently from anything that he had conjectured. She herself was so different from the Desire he had imagined. All these years he had been preparing for her coming, but to her his coming had been an accident. That had hurt—hurt his pride, to have to acknowledge that she had almost forgotten the old kindnesses. And then she had tantalized him—-had taken a pleasure in treating him lightly. Perhaps all girls did that; it might be their way of defending themselves. Probably she hadn’t meant one half of what she had said, and had been trying to shock him. He couldn’t bear that she should think him narrow or censorious. The more he condemned himself, the more he longed to convince her of his breadth and generosity.
He found a florist’s and ordered a quantity of flowers.
“Shall I enclose your card, sir?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
He was afraid that, if she knew for certain they were from him, she might not accept them.
“The lady’s leaving Euston on the boat-train for Liverpool, so you must get them to her at once.”
“You shall see the boy start, sir. Going on a liner, is the lady, sir?”
“Yes, to America.”
“Then, may I make a suggestion?” Desire would have said that the florist was very understanding; he rubbed his hands and looked out of the window to avoid any needless causing of embarrassment. “If I might make a suggestion, sir, I would say it would be very nice to send the lady seven bouquets—one for every day of the voyage.”
“But can it be done? I mean, will the flowers keep fresh?”
“Oh, yes, sir. It’s quite the regular thing. We pack them in seven boxes and we mark each box for the day on which it’s to be opened. We send instructions with them for the lady to give to the purser, to keep them on ice. Usually we slip five shillings into the envelope with the instructions. Then the lady finds her bouquet waiting for her on her plate each morning with her breakfast. The idea is that she’ll think of the gentleman who sent them.” This florist understood too much. He treated love as a thing that happened every day, which, of course, it didn’t. Teddy assumed an off-hand manner. “If it won’t take too long to make up the bouquets, I’ll have them as well.”
“As well as the cut flowers?”
“Yes.”
He helped to select the rosebuds, orchids and violets that were to lie against her breast It gave him a comforting sense of nearness to her. When the man’s back was turned he stooped to catch their fragrance and brushed his lips against their petals. Perhaps she might do the same, and her lips would touch the flowers where his had touched. By subtler words than language they would explain to her his love. When she landed in that far-away New York, he would be with her, for the flowers would have kept his memory fresh.
“Certain you won’t send your card, sir? It’s quite etiquette, I assure you.”
He shook his head irritably. The man took the hint and became absorbed in his own affairs. The boxes were tied up, the bill settled. Teddy watched the boy bicycle away on his errand and envied him the privilege of ringing her door-bell.
Breakfast! He hadn’t had any. He was too excited to feel hungry. He didn’t want to go home yet; he’d have to explain the abrupt ending of his holiday. He was trying to make up his mind to go to the station to see her off. As he drove about, killing time, he came to Trafalgar Square. That made him think of Cockspur Street and the shipping offices. He pulled up at Ocean House to find out what boats were sailing on that day. There were three of them, any one of which might be hers. A mad whim took him. Of course it was out of the question that he should go to America. How could he explain such a voyage to his parents? He couldn’t say, “I met Desire for a handful of hours and I’m in love.” Besides, he would never let any one suspect that he was in love. He wouldn’t even be able to mention his night ride from Glastonbury. It would sound improper to people who weren’t romance-people. He could see the pained look that would steal into his mother’s eyes if he told her. Nevertheless, although it was quite impossible, he asked for a list of sailings and made inquiries as to fares.
Then he drove to Gatti’s for breakfast and a general tidy-up. Something was the matter with the mirrors this morning. He saw himself with humble displeasure. Until he had met Desire, he had felt perfectly contented with his appearance; he had found nothing in it at which to take offense. But now he began to have a growing sense of injury against the Almighty. As he sat in the mirrored room, waiting for his meal to be served, his reflections watched him from half-a-dozen angles. They seemed to be saying to him, “Poor chap! May as well face up to the fact. This is how you look; and you expect her to love you.”
He compared himself with her. He thought of her eyes, her lips, her hair, the grace of her figure, the wonderful smallness of her hands. Her voice came back to him—the sultry, emotional, coaxing way she had of using it The arch self-composure of her manner came back—the glances half-mocking, half-tender which she knew how to dart from under her long lashes. She was more elf than woman.
All her actions and speech were unconsciously calculated to win affection. Her beauty was without blemish; the memory of her filled him with self-ridicule. He regarded himself in the mirrors with sorrowful despising. His face was too long, his eyes too hollow, his mouth too sensitive—nothing was right. How could she ever bring herself to love him? How monstrous it seemed to him now that he should have dared to criticize her! There was only one way to win her approbation—to make her admire his talent A thought struck him. Leaving his meal untasted, he ran out in search of a bookshop.
“A copy of Life Till Twenty-One. Yes, by Theodore Gurney. Can you deliver it?... No, that’s too late. It’s got to be there by eleven. If you can send a boy now, I’ll give him half-a-crown for his trouble. I’ll drive him in my car to within a hundred yards of the house. It’s most important. The people who want it are sailing for America.”
As the shopman wrapped it up, he remarked, “You were in luck to get a copy. There’s been a run on it. The publishers are out of stock. This is our last one.”
Once again he came within sight of her house. At a discreet distance he set his messenger down and saw the book delivered. His heart fluttered as the door opened; she might—it was just possible—she might come out. But no, all he had was a fleeting glimpse of the maid in the white cap and apron.
The moment the deed was done, he was assailed by trepidations. It might seem egotistical to her, bad taste, vaunting. He could almost hear her laughing. Oh, well, if she troubled to read it—and surely she would do that out of curiosity—she would learn exactly how much she had meant to him. She would see her own face looking out from the pen-and-ink drawings that dodged up and down the margins.
Within the next hour he sent her three telegrams. The first simply gave his address in Eden Row. The second said, “Please write to me.” The third was a bold optimism, “Perhaps coming.” After that he had to stop, for the time was approaching when she would be leaving for the station. The signing of the telegrams gave him much difficulty. The first bore his signature in full, “Theodore Gurney”; the next was less formal, “Theodore”; the last touched the chord of memory, “Teddy.” His difficulty had arisen because he couldn’t remember that she had called him anything.
She lived in his thoughts as a phantom—too little as a creature of flesh and blood. Within the brief space that had elapsed since he had touched her, she had become again a faery’s child. The sound of her laughter was in his ears. He imagined how her finger had gone up to her mouth and the babies had come into her eyes, each time the bell had rung and something fresh had been handed in to her. “Very queer and dear of him,” she had said—something like that.
It was nearly twelve. He was torn between his anxiety to see her and his shyness at intruding. If he had had only her to face, he would have gone to Euston; but she’d be surrounded by friends. When it was too late, he cursed his lack of enterprise.
Perhaps she had sent him an answer to his telegrams. He hurried back to Eden Row. As he came in sight of the tree-shadowed street, with the river gleaming along its length and the staid, sleepy houses lining its pavement, the calm normality of an orderly world again accused him. To have suggested to Eden Row a trip to America merely to see a girl would have sounded like an affront to its sanity. As he passed by Orchid Lodge, the carriage-and-pair was waiting for Mrs. Sheerug to come out. For fifteen years she had been going through the same curriculum of self-imposed duties—playing her harp, working at her tapestries, scattering her philanthropies. How could he say to her, “I’m going to America,” without stating an adequate reason?
His mother met him in the hall. “Why, Teddy, back! What’s the matter? You didn’t send us warning.”
“I got tired of roving,” he said. “Has anything come?”
“Come! No. I forwarded your last letters to Glastonbury. I thought you were to be there this morning.”
“So I was to have been, but—I changed my mind suddenly.”
“You look awfully tired.”
“I am.” He forced a laugh. “I haven’t slept. I drove all night for the fun of it. I think I’ll go and lie down.” In the room where he had passed his boyhood dreaming of her, he sat down to wait for her message. He looked out of the window. How unaltered everything was, and yet how different! The pigeons fluttered. In the studio at the bottom of the garden he could make out the figure of his father, standing before his easel. Across the wall, Mr. Yaffon carried cans of water back and forth among his flowers. He remembered the great dread he had had that nothing would ever happen. And now it had happened—money, reputation, and at last Desire. He ought to be feeling immensely glad; he was in love—the make-believe passions of childhood on which he had fed his imagination were ended. The real thing had come. If he could only have one sign from her that she cared——
He listened. Every time he heard the bell ring he went out on to the landing and called, “Anything for me? What is it?”
Afternoon lengthened out. He manufactured reasons for her silence. She had probably intended to telegraph him from Euston, but had been rushed at the last minute. She would do it from Liverpool before she sailed. That would mean that he would hear from her by seven. Anyway she had his flowers and she had his book—so many things to remind her of him. He pictured her curled up in a corner of the railway-carriage, blind to the flying country, deaf to what was going on about her, smiling over the pages of Life Till Twenty-One, and recognizing what poetry he had brought to his loving of her. She wouldn’t be hard on him any longer for his behavior on the ride from Glastonbury. She would understand why he hadn’t liked her to speak of love as though it were flirtation. Perhaps already she was feeling a little proud of him—nearly as proud as he felt of her.
Seven struck on the clock downstairs. Eight, nine, ten! No message would come till morning now; but he would not let himself believe that she had not sent one. Probably she had given it to Horace, and he had slipped it into his pocket and forgotten. Something like that! Or else, being a girl and afraid to appear forward, she would write a letter on the ship and send it ashore by the pilot. A letter would seem to her so much less important than a telegram.
His mother looked in on her way to bed. “Still up? You’ve been hiding all evening. What have you been doing? Working?”
She slipped her arm about his neck and laid her face against his cheek. She was trying to sympathize—trying to draw him out. What did she suspect? Instinctively he barricaded his privacy. He felt a cruel shame that his secret should be guessed. Why he should feel ashamed of love—of love which was so beautiful—he could not tell. “What have you been doing, Teddy?”
He smiled cheerfully. “Doing! I’ve had an idea. A good one. I’ve been thinking it out.”
“For your next book?”
“Perhaps.”
When she was gone, he turned out his light. He knew she would be watching for its glow against the trees. If she did not see it, she would believe him sleeping and her mind would be at rest. Then he seated himself by the open window in the darkness.
He thought of Vashti, who had not married Hal. Did Desire know that her mother had not married? He remembered the horror he had felt when he had learnt that fact—the chivalrous pity for Desire it had aroused. It was then that he had planned, when he became a man, to help her in the paying of the price. And now——
He smiled frowningly. She didn’t seem to need his help. She was the happiest, most radiant person he had ever met. She had found the intenser world, for which he had always been searching—the world which is forever somewhere else. His world—his poor little world, which he had tried to make so fine that he might offer it to her—his world seemed dull in comparison.
“Come to America,” she had said, as though the people she knew were those lucky persons who are at all times free to travel, and never need to trouble about expense. It hadn’t seemed to enter her head that he might have obligations or a living to earn. She hadn’t even inquired; she had just said, “Come to America,” as another might say, “If you care to call, you’ll find me at home on Fridays.”
He adored her the more, as is the way with lovers, for the magnificent inconsequence of her request. It was the standard she set for his need of her—the proof she required. The more he thought, the more certain he was of that.
Next morning brought neither telegram nor letter. All day he stayed at home, fearing that, if he went out, something might arrive in his absence. Her silence drove him to distraction. Could it be that she was offended? Was she annoyed because he had put her into a book? Had she expected him to turn up at Euston for a final farewell? He must get some word to her. There were three ships, any one of which might be carrying her. He went out that evening and addressed a wireless message to her on each of them: “Thinking of you. Longing to hear from you. Love.” He felt very discomforted when the clerk, before accepting them, insisted on reading them over aloud. Again he hoped vainly that she might guess his suspense—perhaps gauge his by her own—and return a wireless. Nothing.
The next three weeks were the longest in his memory. He became an expert on transatlantic sailings. Every day he covered several pages to her. He filled them with sketches; he put into them all the emotion and cleverness of which he was capable. He said all the tender and witty things he had intended to say to her when they met.
He burlesqued his own shyness. He recalled happenings of the old farmhouse days which even he had all but forgotten. As an artist he knew that he was outdoing himself. His letters were masterpieces. He laughed and cried over some of the passages in the same breath. They couldn’t fail to move her. When three weeks had elapsed he began to look for an answer. None came. It was as though she mocked him, saying: “Come to America if you really care.”
He grew hurt. For a month he tried the effect of not writing. Then he tried to forget her, and did his best to become absorbed in his work. But the old habits of industry had lost their attraction; every day was a gray emptiness. His quietness seemed irrecoverable. She haunted him. Sometimes the wind was in her hair and her face was turned from him. Sometimes her gray eyes watched him cloudily, and her warm red lips pouted with tender melancholy. He saw her advancing through the starlit streets of Glastonbury, walking proudly in her queen’s attire. He saw her in a thousand ways; every one was sweet, and every one was torturing.
“This is love,” he told himself; “love which all the inspired people of the world have painted and described and sung.”
The odd thing was that, much as it made him suffer, he would not have been without it.
His mother noticed his restlessness and would have coaxed hi$ secret from him, but his lips were obstinately sealed. He could not bring himself to confess. He resorted to evasions which he felt to be unworthy.
Gradually the determination grew up in him to go to America. He sought for an excuse that would disguise his real purpose. It came to him in a letter from a New York editor, offering prices, which sounded fabulous by English standards, for a series of illustrated reminiscences of childhood similar to those contained in Life Till Twenty-one.
He read the letter aloud at the breakfast table. “I’m going,” he said, “to talk it over.”
“Going where?” his father questioned.
“To America.”
“Oh, nonsense!”
He let the subject drop for the time being; but a few days later he walked out of Ocean House and whistled his way down Cockspur Street to Trafalgar Square. He halted in the drowsy August sun and pulled the ticket from his pocket to examine it. He could scarcely credit the reckless length to which his infatuation had carried him.
He seemed to see her again, standing on the threshold in her green-and-gold pageant costume, whispering tauntingly, “Come to America if you really care.”
She would have to acknowledge now how much she meant to him. He couldn’t wait to tell her. Crossing the street to Charing Cross Telegraph Office, he cabled her the date of his arrival, the ship on which he was sailing and the one word, “Coming.” Then he turned thoughtfully homeward, to break the news to Eden Row.
Her masterly faculty for silence had conquered.