Part 13

Lord Ottercove was getting cheerier and cheerier, and he danced less steadily than he was wont to do. “Now, Chris, don’t you make love to Eva. Hands off! you married men! You haven’t been divorced a month. I at least am a bachelor and can marry her to-morrow if the fancy takes us. Can’t I, Eva? I’ll stop that crater mission of yours if you don’t take yourself away in time.” He looked at Eva. “I’ve got to blow him up a bit from time to time, or he gets too cocky, you know.”

“It’s me who will do it,” de Jones said.

“Do what?”

“Blow you all up.”

Lord Ottercove called the waiter and paid. While they were putting on their coats and pushing through the door into the street, de Jones and Frank lingering behind, Lord Ottercove jumped into the car after Eva, slammed the door and drove off.

XXVIII.

THE REVELATION

“Well,” said Lord de Jones, taking Frank by the arm and leading him into a similar establishment almost next door, “if they are off, we shall continue by ourselves.” And he ordered more champagne and more chicken. The hour was far advanced into the morning and the last revellers were leaving the premises. The band played on sulkily for the two new visitors and looked appealingly at the waiters. “Look here, Dickin,” de Jones said, rather thickly, “you’re a jolly good sort and I am awful fond of you.”

“I, too, I really am, very fond of you, more than I can say.”

The wine had done its noble work: they lived in a world of mutual and uncritical esteem.

“By Jove, you’re a fine fellow, Dickin, that’s what you are! A fine fellow. A _fine fellow_. And a damn good writer too!”

Frank remembered through his dim but blissful state that de Jones could never be persuaded to read a book of any sort, let alone Frank’s novels, but now this fact did not detract, but rather added value to the sincerity of the noble lord’s appreciation. And, when, with swelling heart, Frank answered, “And I feel, de Jones, you’re first among contemporary scientists!” he really felt it. As the waiter opened a new bottle of champagne, Lord de Jones lapsed into reminiscence. “Why do I love that girl? Traits of her mother? As a young man I did not care for women, and they did not care for me. You see what I look like. A Frenchwoman once described my appearance as ‘_ignoble_’! But that one when I saw her first in Russia! Now, of course, she is nothing much to look at. But at that time she was extraordinarily good looking--better than her daughters. I was constrained by her husband and was half blind to her suggestive looks. I wouldn’t listen. Till one day as I was leaving her she fell before me on the floor. That somehow got hold of my senses. Raymond dates back to that incident, I believe. The vision of her prostrate on the floor haunted me always. It made me come back to her. I always went back. And now’s she’s too old.... I am drunk or I wouldn’t be telling you this.”

He was silent a while. “Eva, Dickin,” he said. “He abducted her, but we two can go on loving her more than _he_ will ever understand....”

Dickin’s eyes filled. “We love her,” he said. “We all love her. Perhaps Ottercove too loves her. Why can’t we all love her and love one another?”

“Don’t I know my excellent uncle Lord O.! Have you seen him sign himself ‘O.’? A tremendous O. Nevertheless, the numerical symbol.”

“You are hard on the baron.”

“Am I? I like his boyishness, his prodigious vitality. He is a Hannibal playing quoits with the world. Not, I regret to say, because he loves the world, but because he loves playing quoits. But a rather lovable _enfant terrible_ all the same. He could have helped me. But he would back out of it next day. He has no large plan of action; but he conceals this very cleverly by dramatising every little situation on the spur of the moment, improvising campaigns at the turn of an effective phrase, and making you think that his least bit of whim is the component part of a large premeditated whole.”

“I know. A sort of second inspiration known to dramatists, more clever but more freakish than the main idea.”

“Exactly. But he has no main idea, unless it be a certain feeling for caution, which, coupled with his second inspiration in which he is a virtuoso, determines his success. He may turn into a great peacemaker to-morrow, and the day after find himself uttering: ‘It is not peace I have brought, but a sword,’ and side with the forces of war; and, in turn, prove successful in each. I am bitter because I cannot get him to help me in my mission without resorting to subterfuge, which maddens me. This idiotic crop-growing scheme! He was quick enough to seize it for his own journalistic ends without bothering to probe the scientific aspect. If I could make him understand my real motive I might fire his imagination for a day; but he would sleep on it (he always sleeps on all important questions and telephones his decision in the morning), sleep on it and ring me up at dawn: ‘Look here, Chris. It is a brilliant idea. But I advise you against it. Why? It would not do you any good. Good-bye to you,’ and hang up the receiver. ‘Do you no good.’ Not him, no! No advertising possibilities. Actors and audience simultaneously reduced to smithereens!

“Why should we regret it? Schopenhauer could not understand how it was that man, in the teeth of all this pain and hell of life, had not the sense and pluck to end it. Wherever I look, in every moment there is pain. The pain of memory, the pain of anxiety, the pain of sheer dullness, the pain of regret. You cannot think either backward or forward for ten minutes without a pang of pain. Then why should we be sorry to quit it, to take ourselves away to where pain cannot reach us?

“‘_Who breathes must suffer and who thinks must mourn,_ _And he alone is blest who ne’er was born._’

“It’s a poor life, Dickin. The more successful, the more multifarious and sensitive, the more painful. We are, with our birth, caught in a vice and cannot away. You don’t believe in the devil. But I do. The brain is the devil. A malignant cancerous growth. It’s a mockery from start to finish. We are simply made to chase after our own tail, and Satan stands by and laughs: ‘Let us see whether they have sense and pluck enough to end it.’ The mundane life is a blind avenue we have strayed into while nobody was looking. We must get out. There is no other course. We do not belong here. Do not the eyes of humans and beasts alike tell you that we do not belong here? We must quit _en masse_, get away.

“The cruelty and pain of this world. The pain and cruelty. Donkeys and mules goaded with a stick; the resigned suffering in their eyes. The Arabs cut their donkeys and then prod the wound: ‘Go on, damn you.’ And, in the same way, we are all goaded. On the raw, or we won’t move. Goaded by desire, remorse, love, hope, despair.... Hourly, minute by minute.

“This is not an age that believes in the coming of a new Messiah. It believes, foolishly, in what it can touch and see. What will you say, Dickin, when I tell you that already as a youth I had intimations of a mission, of being a--don’t laugh--a new Messiah, clad not in fine raiment, nor born in a manger, but in the fashion of the age scientifically equipped! Christ showed the way, but lacked the mechanical means. He said this visible world had to be completely and utterly destroyed: He waited for the miracle: but none came. Christ had love, but no dynamite.

“But not for ever will mankind be mocked. My friends, the hour of deliverance is at hand. How is it?: ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life.’ The Resurrection and the Life.” Suddenly his eyes were moist. He wept.

As they walked back it was light and the birds were twittering in the square.

XXIX.

When Frank knocked at Eva’s door there was no answer. As he flung himself into bed the sun already pressed itself through the curtain.

The glowing earth swam in a silver sky. It swam and swam. And a shark came out and followed it wanting to devour it. The poor earth had but two fins and swam helplessly out of the reach of de Jones’s jaws. There she was with all her cities and towns labouring to get away, panting dreadfully; how hard he pushed her and how ineffectively. That was because he was a passenger upon her and helpless as a man endeavouring to accelerate the motion of a train. In his office on the top of the roof, from the captain’s bridge, Ottercove shouted orders through a megaphone: “Faster! faster! faster!” he cried. And the capitalists whipped up the slaves and made them row faster. But a Trade Union strike was just on and the miners and rowing men quitted their tools. And the Prime Minister, as he urged the policemen to hearten them up with their bayonet points, appealed to the galley slaves’ sense of duty and patriotism and called on them “by a supreme effort, their loyalty and solidarity in the cause of Humanity to save this planet, our Mother Earth, the common heritage of all our race, from the treacherous jaws of that monster,” while Ottercove from the bridge, whence there opened a limitless view of the world, including Ludgate-hill and St. Paul’s, shouted at them through the megaphone: “Faster, damn you! Still faster!” Already de Jones’s huge lower jaw dropped and took water as he swam up very close, and Frank’s heart stopped beating. The shark’s jaws opened quite wide about to swallow the earth with London and Paris and Vienna and all, and the men in the fields and the women and animals and the suffering; and Ottercove from his bridge (pushing aside the Prime Minister) encouraged the rowing men with a long, big stick, as de Jones’s sharp teeth fastened upon the green flanks of the earth--an enormous stick like the trunk of a tree: Bang! bang! bang! The knocking grew louder.

Frank opened his eyes. “Come in,” he said.

The door opened admitting Gilbert’s tremulous frame. “Sorry to waken you, sir, but his lordship asks if you will take breakfast with him in his bedroom.”

He threw on his dressing-gown and followed the valet into his master’s apartment, where he found the baron in bed, which was littered with newspapers. “Well,” said Lord Ottercove genially, “I’ve got away with the goods.” The balcony door was wide open. The blue Mediterranean stretched out its paws and basked in the sun.

De Jones came in, and at the same time Eva in her pink dressing-gown and red-heeled slippers sidled in from the adjoining room. “Gilbert,” she said, “please wrap these up for me.”

“Yes, my lady.”

“Let me introduce you to my wife,” said Ottercove.

“Your wife--?”

“We went and got married last night,” she explained.

“A brain wave,” said Ottercove. “I get such brain waves sometimes.”

“A happy thought,” said Eva.

“The second inspiration,” de Jones looked at Frank.

“Anyway I got the better of you two there,” said Ottercove uncertainly.

“You did,” said Eva. “It never occurred to them to do it. And I am sure I gave you plenty of opportunities, Ferdinand.” Her tone was meek and propitiating. “So it’s not my fault.”

“No, of course not. Still, it is a blow. One is never so keen on a thing as when one has just lost it.”

Lord Ottercove smiled pleasantly. The assertion seemed to rehabilitate his doubting judgment as to whether he had acted wisely overnight. “Of course,” he said, “she’s a nice girl and wanted encouraging with marriage to a man of brains and money who can do something with her. I felt all along it would have been sheer waste throwing her away on either of you. Casting pearls before swine, though I don’t, of course, mean anything personal. Will you both lunch with us?”

At lunch Lord Ottercove was subdued. All competition had suddenly ceased with his acclaim as the winner; yet he did not look at all as though he had won the Derby. He looked as he must have felt: as if he had rolled head over heels in his best trousers and torn a hole in the seat, and that instead of everyone laughing and clapping they merely said to him, “Go and change.” In passing things during lunch and helping himself he looked a little shame-faced, and the three men were all glad when the meal was over and they could go for a drive. Each wanted to be sure that Eva took the ukulele with her to help them slide over the blank minutes. Frank enjoyed riding about with Lord Ottercove in powerful motor-cars, rapidly, rapidly, with a purposeful air, to no particular destination. It was somehow, he felt, symbolical of Ottercove’s whole person. “Now, Chris, shut up and let us hear what Dickin has to say.” And after listening to Frank, “Now, Dickin, shut up. You’ve said enough. Chris, let’s hear you.” Then: “Well, neither of you seem to have anything very illuminating to say. I had better think it out myself.”

“You’re a genius,” said Frank. “A genius of God-knows-what; but a genius!”

“Yes,” concurred de Jones, “there is no doubt at all about your greatness; there may be some doubt about the quality of your greatness, but no doubt about the greatness.”

“Yes, when you are without your spectacles, Rex, you look a genius,” said Eva. “But the moment you put them on you look like a doctor or a harassed business man, or a clergyman who says, ‘How are we this morning?’”

“My heart,” said Lord Ottercove, “very jumpy to-day.”

“I think it’s the stomach,” said Eva.

“I think it’s the stomach,” said Ottercove gravely, but reassured.

“I think so,” said Frank. “Complete stoppage of the bowels.”

“Better go back and telephone for the doctor,” said Eva.

Lord Ottercove was touched if you chanced to ask about his health, and now at Eva’s solicitude his eyes brimmed with tears. He took her hand and stroked it. He was so moved by her attitude that he could not speak, and only swallowed several times, and looked away. His health was not too good. His boiler would suddenly demur in the midst of festivities and pursue a mood of its own, and looking at the baron now as he reclined hatless in the depth of the limousine, Dickin wondered if the centre of his lordship’s mind was not--his expression suggested it--superintending the issues fought within him.

“No wonder,” Eva said, “your nose is red and shiny with all this whizzing up and down in motor-cars and not a moment’s quietness.”

He stroked her hand and went to sleep.

Frank looked a long time at Eva, reproachfully, before he asked in a whisper: “Why, why did you marry him? Why?”

“I thought it would please Pilling.”

“And I am forgotten! It didn’t take long.”

“But you are married yourself.”

“True. I’d forgotten.”

“Rex telegraphed last night after we had got married for Mummy and Zita and Pilling and Raymond and all to come out. ‘Let ’em all come out, the whole bag o’ tricks of them!’ he said. And we were married by a funny-looking parson; Rex had to pull him out of bed to marry us. He gave him five minutes to slip into some clothes, and a hundred pounds of money, and he married us in the sitting room without any trouble; said it would be all right. I was so pleased it was definite. But Rex looked puzzled and worried and talked to himself all the time, and when we were back in the car he said he must have walked upstairs to the clergyman’s flat in his sleep and wondered whether what he had just done could not be undone perhaps by the Pope if he said he was a sleep-walker. But I said the law was sacred and definite for better or worse. And when we were all alone in the car and I began kissing him because he was my husband and expected him to behave like a bridegroom, he was so scared and looked through the window as though he wanted to jump out. And I held him back and tried to calm him down, and he kept saying: ‘My God! My God!’ And he asked me what had happened on the hill then? And I said, ‘Read Ferdinand’s serial.’ And he said, ‘Did it happen as in the serial?’ I said, ‘Read the serial and never mind what happened.’ And so he looked as though he’d gone and paid a huge price for something he’d bought at a shop and then got home and found it was quite rotten.”

“You may be his wife, Eva,” de Jones said, “but first and foremost you are my secretary. And you shall remain with me for the duration of my mission.”

“Yes, I will do my best, Chris, to help you grow wheat.”

He laughed. “They will believe anything--anything. But if ever you conceive something really terrible, nobody will hinder you but they will let you blow them up into smithereens with the sympathetic assistance of the Ottercoves and such who will believe the first cock-and-bull story that you choose to tell them.”

Lord Ottercove opened one eye and glared with it at de Jones, then closed it.

“Let us change the conversation,” Eva said.

Pointing at a pillared villa, “I like that pillared thing,” Frank said. “It asserts itself on the surrounding landscape. It’s a yea-saying to life! None of your snivelling English houses looking like half-built factories of red brick, hiding their faces as if ashamed of themselves.”

“Buy it, Rex, just for the two of us,” said Eva.

“I’ll buy it,” said the baron.

They got out and bought it, and then motored back to Nice in time for tea.

After tea, de Jones took Frank by the arm and marched him up and down the deserted, wind-swept Promenade des Anglais. “Why did he marry that girl, Dickin? He had no notion of it when he left us at Maxime’s last night. Just to be able to say to us in the morning: ‘I’ve got away with the goods.’ For the love of the phrase. And mind you, he didn’t seduce her--no fun in that, no advertisement! altogether too ordinary--but he married her to do something more striking that may arouse comment. He just felt that he owed it to himself and his brains and his money and all to afford a real piece of folly.”

“No, de Jones, it is we who are the fools for not having married her. His second inspiration has not failed him. It never does. He has enriched the rest of his life. Her sheer livingness is inexhaustible and--I can see it in your eyes, hear it in your voice--you love her as I do, more and more, to my dismay. All art is the translation of the subjective into an object. Thus I prefer Eva to earnest women who can talk of Pessimism and Buddhism but have no living and spontaneous form themselves. When an object like Eva shows no visible sign of containing a subject but appeals beyond all analysis, it may be taken that the divine spirit has found in her a happy home. She is God’s art, perfect like a flower.”

“You are right, Dickin. The soul wants fresh food, just the same as the body. And what some please to call the divided soul is the taste of a spiritual epicure whose crime and curse is that he does not care for preserved food. My excellent uncle Lord O. must always have everything of the best.”

“Oh, the memory of that first kiss! How she came into my arms, pliable like a young plant. The hot sun, the menace of our end, and the longing not to die unmarried. De Jones, I can’t believe that I have lost her. She will have all his houses and horses and servants to play with.”

“But not all the King’s horses, not all the King’s men, can put Humpty-Dumpty together again.”

When in the evening Frank returned to his rooms, he found a gold watch on his table. The watch was studded with large diamonds and inside was the engraved inscription:

“_From Eva Ottercove_ _With Love._”

When he entered the Ottercove’s suite and lingered in the drawing-room he was startled by the animated conversation which reached him from the adjoining bedroom. “Now don’t you think,” said a grieved, perhaps somewhat sarcastic voice, unmistakably the baron’s, “you should have taken me into your counsels instead of first disposing of the watch and then sending the jeweller to me for the money?”

“But you haven’t seen it!” the baroness rejoined impatiently. “It’s not at all expensive for what it is; it’s all in diamonds. What’s the use of your saying anything when you haven’t _seen_ it?”

“Just so. Don’t you think I should have seen it, in view of your youth and inexperience, instead of laying yourself out to be swindled?”

“It’s nothing to you even to be swindled, so why make any bones about it?”

This seemed to disarm the other for a space. “Why do you do these things?” he then asked sadly.

“I wanted to please him.”

“But you could have waited a little, or asked.”

“You are an awful old miser,” she said, “and I am sorry I ever married you.”

“I see that I shall have to engage a governess to go about with you and chaperone you for a bit.”

“You are a walking mountain of impudence!” said the baroness, “and I don’t know what God was about when he made you!”

XXX.

Eva’s comment was not lost on Lord Ottercove. When next morning they drove to the Beau-Site in Cannes, Lord Ottercove wore a more becoming pair of horn-rimmed spectacles.

“Just gone and settled their affairs,” he said, coming out on to the sunny terrace, where Eva’s relatives awaited him against the background of an ornamental garden and tennis courts on which rich Americans and English exercised their limbs all day.

“Very charming and touching,” said Mrs. Kerr. “But you should not have put yourself out, Lord Ottercove. Raymond would have settled my bill, I am sure. He is his mother’s boy.”

“Mummy, you are too silly for words!” Zita flared up. “Where does Raymond get his money?”

“From Eleonor of course.”

“And Eleonor?”

“From her uncle.”

“Well?”

“But I give it all to Chris.”

“Mummy is so stupid. She always draws wrong conclusions from everything. There she goes about with that ‘Please trample on me’ look, smoking cigarettes all day, agreeing with everybody. She takes Italian lessons at five shillings an hour, and in order to make up for it gives golfing lessons at five shillings an hour, and then takes her pupils out to tea, and spends ten shillings; or has her portrait done in the café; always invites everybody, stands drinks and cigarettes all round, pays for everybody; speaks to everybody in the restaurants--Italians, Germans, Scandinavians.”

“She is a white woman,” muttered Lord Ottercove.

“You know what I’ll tell you, Lord Ottercove! I am disappointed in Fyodor Ferdinandovitch. I knew nothing--nothing about it, till I read it in _Pale Primroses_. Naturally I asked the girls, and it all came out.”

“I know.”

“But both! _Both!_”

“He didn’t wish to leave either out, for fear of offending the other, I guess.”

“Mrs. Kerr,” said Frank, “I appeal to your idealism and good sense. In the severity of your indignation, you did not sufficiently allow for the circumstances in which, if I may put it thus, the drama was played. Picture the scene. All around us, an epic panorama, and I alone with two girls ... lovely girls ... the mountain spring ... certain death--and Shakespeare’s immortal lines--

“‘_O Proserpina!_ _For the flowers now that frighted thou let’st fall_ _From Dis’s waggon! daffodils,_ _That come before the swallow dares, and take_ _The winds of March with beauty; violets dim,_ _But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes_ _Or Cytherea’s breath; pale primroses_ _That die unmarried, ere they can behold_ _Bright Phoebus in his strength, a malady_ _Most incident to maids; bold oxlips and_ _The crown-imperial; lilies of all kinds,_ _The flower-de-luce being one! Oh! these I lack_ _To make you garlands of, and my sweet friend,_ _To strew him o’er, and o’er._’

“These loyal girls!” He placed a hand on either sister’s shoulder, and drew them to him. “These splendid girls!”

“Whom you have dishonoured!”

“Tut-tut, Mummy!” said Zita. “You mustn’t blurt these things out! Morty will murder Frank if he knows.”

“Well,” said Lord Ottercove, “I have made an honest woman of one of them at any rate--sorry, can’t do it to both.”

“I do not understand you, Lord Ottercove.”

“I have made an honest woman of Eva.”

“Explain it to me, please. I don’t understand.”

“I have married her.”

There was a pause. Mrs. Kerr looked round at them all, and satisfied herself that the statement was a bona-fide one.