Part 14

“Well--I am very pleased. I must say that you have chosen well and wisely. She will make a good wife to you. I congratulate you both.”

“I hope, Mrs. Kerr,” Frank said, “that your grudge against me is over. I trust that you will rejoice in your daughter’s happiness, and will ever remember that the assignation of unworthy motives never helps but weakens an argument.”

“Dickin talks rot, but always with conviction. He would make a good lawyer,” said Ottercove.

“Yes, or a great priest,” said Frank, obviously pleased with himself. “I like to practise my oratorical gift.”

“Now let’s make a night of it!” proposed Mrs. Kerr.

Lord Ottercove did not reply. Lord Ottercove hated to act on other people’s suggestions and as a rule “advised them against it,” and if pressed for his reasons, produced arguments so cynically free from plausibility that he seemed himself amused by their bewildering effect on his opponent. If he approved of a suggestion, he said nothing; then, a few moments later, made it himself.

“I am taking you out to-night, all of you,” he said.

Pilling took Frank by the arm and marched him ahead, while the others followed behind at a distance.

“Glad you done it,” he said. “I thought it was me. My conscience sort of worried me. It’s a dirty thing to do. Glad you done it.”

“Damn it all, Pilling! It was a hill. Spring! Sunshine! You know those lines from Shakespeare?

“‘_O Proserpina,_ _For the flowers now that frighted--_’”

“Shut up, Dickin!”

“You don’t realise the situation. We thought it was the end for us.”

“I realise. _Force majeure._ That white-washes it a bit. Otherwise, you know, I doubt whether you would be eligible for the best clubs.”

“Still, I am disappointed in Ferdinand Fyodorovitch,” said Mrs. Kerr, coming up from behind.

“I appeal to your idealism,” said Frank automatically. “As I said, the sun, the mountain spring--and those immortal lines--‘_O Proserpina!..._’”

They would not let him go on. Strange: the moment he began to quote those lovely lines, they would look sullen and angry, and ask him to “shut up.” It seemed as if they regarded his appeals to Shakespeare as in bad taste; till he would lose his temper. “It would really seem that my great crime consisted in getting saved!”

Eleonor, after some consultation with Raymond, came up to her uncle and took him aside. “It’s all very well,” she said, “Chris having adopted Raymond. But suppose Chris marries again and has a child of his own?”

“Then we must get him married at once.”

“Married! That is just what we are anxious to prevent, for fear it might result in a male child.”

“Married, of course, to somebody who is beyond hope of begetting children,” said Ottercove.

“But who?”

“To his old love, of course--Mrs. Kerr.”

“But how do you know she can’t have a child?”

“Her doctor told me in confidence.”

“But he will refuse!”

“We must bring pressure to bear on him.”

“How?”

“Chris is ruined, and he’s used to spending money. He knows I won’t give him a penny, and, in fact, he won’t have it from me. He likes to feel independent towards me. But of course, it’s only natural that Raymond, married to my niece who draws on my account to an unlimited extent, can’t help, good and loving son that he is, helping his mother. And Chris, married to her, will be all right.”

“Raymond and I want to marry next week in Paris,” said Eleonor.

Lord Ottercove’s lips moved almost silently. “Why not marry here? I know a chap--a parson--most obliging. Pulled him out of bed the other night to marry us. Read the marriage ceremony unruffled.”

“Yes, most obliging,” Eva concurred.

“And you, Chris? And you, Mrs. Kerr?”

“What’s that?”

“Why don’t you get married?”

“I don’t know that it’s very safe to attach me to her with the tape of a spent passion.”

“Look here, I’ve got hold of a fellow--a pastor of some obscure denomination. Very accommodating. He will remarry you all. What d’you think of it?”

“I am very glad, Chris, to be of use. You are a genius--”

“Of the untried,” said Ottercove.

“A real genius in science. And I want to help you in your discoveries. Yes, I do. Take the case of the Curies.”

“You mean Monsieur and Madame Curie?”

“Yes, I do. You will instruct me in your science and we will make new discoveries together, you and I, Christopher!”

“Help us!” Turning to Frank, he whispered: “They think they have got the better of me there. But the boot is on the other foot! What do I care whether I am blown up--single or married?”

“So in the end, all are satisfied,” said Ottercove.

“Except my poor ancestors,” murmured de Jones.

“Who are dead.”

“Who are dead.”

Pilling seemed pleased and impressed. “Lord Ottercove,” he remarked, as if out of the baron’s hearing, but loud enough for the baron to hear, “is a man of wide sympathies.”

“He is a live wire,” from de Jones.

That night, dashing off to Monte Carlo, where Lord Ottercove was entertaining them, Pilling was seen to step into the baron’s car, who not only did not seem to resent this intrusion, but actually welcomed him with a smile. “I have, as you say, wide sympathies. When I see a man struggling to get out of the water, I can’t resist helping him. It is my nature,” he was heard to say, stepping out of the car.

And, stepping again into the car with Pilling close on his heels, on the way back to Nice, he was heard to say: “I have an interest in a number of hotels which brings me in--er--about--er--three hundred thousand pounds a year, and I’ll finance you in your undertaking,” and slam the door behind him.

Next day, Mrs. Kerr, who always liked to show off herself and hers, called her new husband into the bathroom while John was shaving. “Look, look!” she said. “What a big sponge John has!” But Christopher looked as though he wished the sponge had been smaller, and the dowry larger.

The same day Frank picked up, in the lounge of the hotel, a newspaper, which informed him:

“Among the new arrivals at the Hotel Mauresco are Lord and Lady Ottercove, Viscount and Viscountess de Jones, Mr. Frank Dickin, the novelist, and the Honourable and Mrs. Raymond Mosquito.”

XXXI.

Since the wedding had taken place in Nice, the bride and bridegroom felt that they had to “get away” for their honeymoon, and elected a voyage by yacht. “I have got away with the goods,” said Lord Ottercove, “and I must get away with them.”

“I must leave at once,” said de Jones.

“I agree,” from Ottercove.

But as de Jones would not part with his secretary, and the new Lady de Jones would not part with her husband, they all left together, Frank as a supernumerary.

Perhaps, as a result of his marriage to Mrs. Kerr, Lord de Jones found delight in concentrating on his missionary work, dictating for hours and hours to Eva, who complained of “her poor brains.” He dictated to her, and made her read aloud her shorthand, and every time it seemed to him a mystery and a miracle. He did not really believe anyone capable of deciphering those puzzled and bewildered little signs they made.

He was beautifully in love with her, and every word she typed seemed to him a romance. He scanned the typescript, and suddenly perceived a letter she had erased with her own darling fingers so as to insert the right one: his heart filled with tears.

Frank conceived it his duty to warn her. “Be careful of him. This dictating is all very well, but it’s not the end of the business. It’s unwholesome to be alone with that man. He can--he can--”

“He can do nothing.”

“He can seduce you.”

“You have.”

“True. I’d forgotten.”

She looked at him quizzically.

“You don’t know that Chris--yes, I might as well say it plainly--well, you know as well as I do about Chris and your mother.”

“They are married.”

“Now they are. They haven’t before. Raymond is a living indictment of their relations.”

“Yes--Raymond--he somehow never cared for his father. But I don’t mind Chris loving me, because he is a friend of Mummy’s.”

“I have nothing further to say.”

“Thank goodness for that!”

But he would return at once with more to say.

“You shouldn’t make yourself so cheap, Eva!”

“Why shouldn’t I? He is so lonely, and never had a nice girl to love him.”

“Eva!”

“It gives him so much pleasure, and it’s so little trouble to me.”

“You leave my girl wife alone!” said Ottercove, coming upon Chris and Eva suddenly in the seclusion of the Captain’s bridge. “Why don’t you leave the girl alone?”

De Jones blinked at him. “There is a divinity,” he said, “that shapes our ends, rough-hew them as we may.”

“You’ve got your wife, Chris. What do you want with mine?”

“She reminds me of her mother,” said de Jones.

“Ha! Not so bad!”

“She’s more like her mother was than her mother is.”

“But I’ve got away with the goods!” He strolled up and down several times, and then stopped, peering at the horizon. “Oh, my heart!”

“I think it’s the stomach,” said Chris.

“Yes, I think it’s the stomach,” said Ottercove.

“Poor darling!” from Eva.

At that, tears came to his eyes, and he turned away to hide his emotion.

XXXII.

_Fliesse, fliesse, lieber Fluss!_ _Nimmer werd’ ich froh;_ _So verrauschte Scherz und Kuss_ _Und die Treue so._ _Goethe._

Everything went wrong with Frank; he could succeed in nothing. He had no luck in anything--but he won steadily at ping-pong. He was rapidly losing his hair. But on that score he was optimistic. As his hair fell out more and more, he lost neither courage nor faith, but interpreted this as a process preparatory to new growth. The new hair which was to make its appearance must, he argued, have room; and the old hair was making room for it--with alacrity. When, after a time, it had entirely disappeared, he judged that now at last the field was clear for a fresh crop. And, as if to compensate him for his premature bereavement on the top, dispassionate nature started a particularly bristling, pushful growth out of his nostrils. Even so, his faith in the value of human striving had not deserted him. All other remedies having failed, he determined to grow hair by sheer strength of will. And he was succeeding--succeeding....

Lord Ottercove devoted more and more time to reading. He had always been a great reader, but now, since his marriage to Eva, he spent all the day with her reading a book to himself. He had always been bored, but now, married to her, he seemed more bored than ever before.

The haze and hurry, the dreamy unreality of modern life. Frank was bewildered rather than bored with it. He was thrown like flotsam into the stream and was swept along. But he would step out--and life would be timeless. He could not tell how passionately he craved to step out of life in time, while he was with de Jones, Mrs. Kerr, and Ottercove.

The scrambling on the part of the three men for the favours of Eva, as the yacht made its way towards Rome, was too much for Frank, and he left them at Genoa, travelling north by rail.

And now, as he looked back, the bleak hours he once spent with Eva seemed coloured beads wetted in light and translucent with a meaning. The actual giving at the time was crude and like a pain. The remembrance of it, as it grew more distant, was as the faint perfume of roses, a romance far off. Dead, perhaps, we see these things completely. He remembered how in that first kiss she had pressed herself, a pliant plant, against him, and closed her eyes, as if to shut in the vision: there was something in her movement half instinctive which thrilled him in one so young; half naïve, as though she had only read of it in books and now, for the first time, was tasting love, and staging it, in actual life! He remembered how at his dentist’s one day, they had sat together side by side on the narrow sofa in the waiting-room, and as the attendant turned his back on them, he had touched her thigh and knee (oh, thigh! oh, knee!), and at once when they were out, and in the taxi, she had kissed him on his dentisted mouth. He remembered too, how she had written to him once about a Cambridge “student,” alleged to have given her circumstantial proof of his, Ferdinand’s, unfaithfulness, and when he wrote to her demanding that she substantiate the charge, and challenged her to identify the Cambridge “student,” her writing back: “Let us drop the subject, as the matter is muddling.” Or how, after saying to him: “You must absolutely send me roses for my birthday to-morrow, Ferdinand!” she telegraphed next day: “Please don’t send flowers;” and the basket of flowers he sent her in gallant disregard of her wire crossed her letter to him containing a bill for £5 for a costume she could not resist acquiring, and which she lent forthwith to a friend who did not come back with it. At the time he resented this overture. Now, in retrospect, it moved him: did it not show a touching solicitude not to lead him into needless expense in the face of an already existing bill--when she might so easily have asked for both! He now thought of her feelings when one day he had spoken to her like a boor, and barely tried to conceal his tedium in her presence. He remembered the moistened look in her eye, the curve of her brow, the twitch of her lashes. And these metaphors of love stirred and racked his soul.

In Milan, cold, sparse, and unfriendly, where at nightfall woeful figures dotted the wide, deserted, wind-swept streets, his heart, grown tender through memory, constricted in sombre anguish. “Poor women!” he thought.

Getting into the Vienna express at midnight, into a coupé in which the blinds were drawn and the passengers asleep, his mood darkened and deepened. A siren at his side, opening her eyes at his intrusion, resumed a desultory conversation with another, a pale coughing girl, with whom she was travelling north where “trade” was deemed to be better. “On arrival,” she flustered, “I must buy myself some new hair, and then you will wait for me downstairs while I go up and see Francesca about giving us a room.” The girl close to him addressed him in Italian. “I do not speak Italian,” Frank said. “Do you speak English?”

“Yes,” she said, articulating deliberately: “we have no b-hananas; we have no b-hananas to--day.”

Was that all she knew of English? No, there were other words she knew. “Love”--“kiss”--“cheque-book.” Did he have a cheque-book? Englishmen, she said, always had a cheque-book. It was, she thought, their distinguishing characteristic. Where were they going? To Budapest--where they had once lived with their parents. “At the time when we were still honest,” she added.

“Fallen women! Lost women! Poor lost women!”

“In this world we are all lost men and women,” echoed a voice in him to the shattering rhythm of the train.

All lost men and women. Lost. Some more luxuriously lost than others, but all, all lost. Lost and damned. No escape!

He closed his eyes. Lost, lost, lost ... lost, lost, lost....

A long, wide, endless road stretched before him. He is walking down that road, the road to Purgatory. What is the crowd outside that house? He stops and watches. They are carrying out an open coffin with a young girl in it. The old harpies in the crowd shake their heads. “She took her life.” “What, took her life?” “She has been betrayed by a young good-for-nothing.” “No, she died in childbirth.”

“Let me! Let me!” He rushes to her. “I was the first to cause her fall. Oh, wait! Don’t close the lid! O, Eva! Dearest heart. She died for love ... like Fräulein Else.”

He sheds hot tears as he kneels on her cold tomb which hides her and her young white purity. But as he rises and leaves the cemetery, she follows silently behind him to the gate, where, sensing something, he turns round. “Eva!”

“I don’t want to be buried. I am yours,” she says, coming to him in her long white shroud. “Take me away with you.”

They kiss. He is forgiven....

“What’s this?” He opens his eyes, heavy with tears.

“Verona. A stop of forty minutes,” imparts his vis-à-vis, “and there is a cold buffet.”

Another dream, another life!

XXXIII.

He found himself, largely against his intention, writing long letters to Eva. But Eva never wrote--only cabled. He had cables from Stockholm and Moscow, Pekin and Buenos Ayres. It was not until they were nearing home that Frank had a letter from her. Christopher de Jones, she wrote, was madly in love with her. “_He said he wanted me to be his entirely and everlastingly, if you know what I mean. I let him have his way because he says he is quite serious about blowing up the world, and I think if he had a little baby of his own, shurely he wouldn’t do such a thing. But Rex does not agree with me. I told him all the truth about Christopher and he says he is going to divorce me. I am furious, and He is Furious. Never mind Darling, if I flirt with him he won’t divorce me._”

Frank planned to stay abroad for a long time to come. He would not return to England, perhaps for years. One morning, however, he received advice from Victoria Station that his cloak-room expenses in respect of a trunk he had forwarded to his address in London, and which could not be opened by the Custom officials as he had not sent them the key, were piling up in geometrical progression, rising hourly, minute by minute. The news shocked him out of his resolution to stay away from England. Hiring a special motor, he rushed headlong to the station and caught the express train to Boulogne, only to learn, on his arrival at Victoria, that his cloak-room expenses amounted to seventeen shillings and ninepence. He felt as a man, who, arriving breathless at the station, finds that the train is not due for another half-hour. He was that kind of man--the business side of life was a perpetual nightmare to him. Having arrived in England, he made up his mind to stay there. A month later, he recorded in his journal:

“_There is nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting moon. The magnetic O. usurps more and more of my interest. Late at night we dash into the country, spending the night at his resplendent country house, and rush back to town in the morning. Feverish activity. Articles are written, printed, and forgotten; to-day’s paper lights to-morrow’s fire. It goes on--dances and entertainments; the dinners and drinks of to-day are washed away into the ocean to-morrow. ‘To-morrow and to-morrow, and to-morrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day, till the last syllable of recorded time, and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death,’ O, if only this were all to end, change soon, this vexatious, unavailing life in time! Don’t make it long, O Lord!_

“_Yesterday I visited Bourne Abbey (Ottercove’s country house) with O. and Eva. As we went upstairs I sniffed the air; there seemed to be a queer musty smell. I asked O. what it was. ‘I am sorry, Dickin,’ he said. ‘I am very sorry that there should be a smell.’ Eva seemed quite at home; no trace of self-consciousness--a perfect hostess._

“_Last week Christopher de Jones came to me. The electric light had failed, and his face looked worn and secretive by candle light, like a monk’s. The lines round his mouth had deepened, too. We talked of the end of the world; his voice and general attitude were apocalyptic. He ended by making a confession. ‘You know why I always come here. It is because you know her. I come to you so as to talk of her. You love her. And I--I--I--‘_

“_I should welcome the change foreshadowed in the Apocalypse. For time is a cheat, and life a snare. It is the curse of life in time that it can only give us one thing at a time, while a latent memory of Eden in us longs for all things all the time; ‘and nothing’ says Shakespeare, (meaning not-being) ‘brings me all things.’ ‘Abwarten,’ (abide, or perhaps better: mark time) was Goethe’s motto in the wisdom of old age. But while conscious of the mirage of love and freedom (for here again, while all the world seems open to you, you must needs trail a narrow path, zigzag it as you will), I have not the strength of will to forego their piecemeal felicities with their fickle promise of what life was before the fall. And so it is that though I expect nothing from life (and thus have agreeable surprises), I shall live it (as one would say of reading an unpromising manuscript) with interest, till we are changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump._

“_And, aye, there is hope! Lord de Jones has bought a penny trumpet and threatens to shatter us all into dust. Well, we shall see. Or, rather, we shall not see. Cease seeing. I wonder which...._”

XXXIV.

Lord de Jones put down the newspaper, and closed his eyes. After the reading of a newspaper, particularly a Sunday newspaper, he generally experienced an acute feeling of nausea, as though he had eaten a fruit salad of the very worst kind. And indeed there was enough in it to-day to disconcert a sensitive reader. There was the “Dog Election” in England; the Fundamentalist-Evolutionist feud in America growing into what looked very like a civil war; and a European embroglio likely to develop into a new world war overnight. Yet in all three cases the initial cause of contention had been so slight that but for the gravity of the consequences he would have dismissed it all as unreal.