CHAPTER XVII

THE FLY IN THE AMBER

The sleet had driven honestly into snow by the time John had finished his lunch and, there being but two old original members in the Martyrs' Club, who were congratulating each other upon having put on their fur coats, stayed in town and not gone to the country, he left as soon as his meal was over.

The hall-porter stood reluctantly to his feet as he passed out,--so reluctantly that John felt as though he should apologise for the etiquette of the club. In the street, he turned up the collar of his coat and set off with determination, intended to show the hall-porter that he had a definite destination and but little time in which to reach it.

Round the corner and out of sight, he began counting to himself the people he might go and see. Each name, as he reviewed it in his mind, presented some difficulty either of approval or of place. At last, he found himself wandering in the direction of Holborn. In a side street of that neighbourhood lived his little typewriter, who had promised to finish two short stories over Easter. She would be as glad of company as he. She would willingly cease from pounding the symphony of the one monotonous note on those lifeless keys. They would talk together of wonderful works yet to be typed. He would strum on her hired piano. The minutes would slip by and she would get tea, would boil the kettle on that miniature gas-stove, situated in her bedroom, where he had often imagined her saying her prayers in the morning while a piece of bacon was frying in the pan by her side--prayers, the Amen of which would be hastened and emphasised by the boiling over of the milk. Those are the prayers that reach Heaven. They are so human. And a burnt sacrifice of burnt milk accompanying them, they are consistent with all the ritual of the Old Testament.

To the little typewriter's, then, he decided to go. It did not matter so very much if his stories were not finished over Easter. They could wait.

He rang the bell, wondering if her heart was leaping as his had done but an hour or so before. His ears were alert for the scurrying of feet on her uncarpeted, wooden stairs. He bent his head sideways to the door. There was no sound. He rang again. Then he heard the creaking of the stairs. She was coming--oh, but so slowly! Annoyed, perhaps, by the disturbance, just as she was getting into work.

The door was opened. His heart dropped. He saw an old woman with red-rimmed eyes which peered at him suspiciously from the half-opened space.

"Is Miss Gerrard in?" he asked.

"Gone to the country--won't be back till Tuesday," was the reply.

Gone to the country! And his work would never be finished over Easter! Oh, it was not quite fair!

"Any message?" said the old housekeeper.

"No," said John; "nothing," and he walked away.

Circumstance was conspiring that he should work--circumstance was driving him back to Fetter Lane. Yet the loneliness of it all was intolerable. It was, moreover, a loneliness that he could not explain. There had been other Easter Sundays; there had been other days of snow and sleet and rain, but he had never felt this description of loneliness before. It was not depression. Depression sat there, certainly, as it were upon the doorstep, ready to enter at the faintest sound of invitation. But as yet, she was on the doorstep only, and this--this leaden weight at the heart, this chain upon all the energies--was loneliness that he was entertaining, a condition of loneliness that he had never known before.

Why had he gone to see the little typewriter? Why had he not chosen the man who illustrated his stories, or many of the other men whom he knew would be in town that day and any day--men who never went into the country from one year's end to the other?

It had been the company of a woman he had wanted. Why was that? Why that, suddenly, rather than the company he knew he could find? What was there in the companionship of a woman that he had so unexpectedly discovered the need of it? Why had he envied Mr. Brown who had Mrs. Morrell to talk to, or Mr. Morrell who could unburden himself to Mrs. Brown? Why had he been glad when Mrs. Rowse came and unutterably lonely when she left? Why had he suggested going to the country with her, pleased at the thought that Lizzie would sing, "Love Me and the World Is Mine," and that Maud would be counting and packing cigarettes in her mind?

The questions poured into his thoughts, rushing by, not waiting for an answer, until they all culminated in one overwhelming realisation. It was Jill.

Morning after morning, for a whole week, they had met in secret, not in Kensington Gardens alone, but in the most extraordinary of places--once even at Wrigglesworth's, the obscure eating-house in Fetter Lane, she little knowing how near they were to where he lived. He had read her his stories; he had given her copies of the two books that bore his name upon their covers. They had discussed them together. She had said she was sure he was going to be a great man, and that is always so consoling, because its utter impossibility prevents you from questioning it for a moment.

Then it was Jill. And all the disappointment, all the loneliness of this Easter Sunday had been leading up to this.

Common sense--except in that mad moment when he had hoped the bell had been rung by her--had debarred him from thinking of seeking her out. But away in the deep corners of his mind, it was her company he was looking for--her company he had sought to find, first in Mrs. Rowse and then in the little typewriter.

Shutting the door of his room, he went across to the chair by the fire. What did it mean? What did it mean? Here and there he had fallen in love; but this was not the same sort of thing. This was not falling in love. Falling in love was quick, sudden, a flash that burnt up all desire to work, flared out in a moment, obliterating everything else. But this was slow, stealthy, a growing thing that asked, not for sudden satisfaction, but for wonderful, untellable things.

All the attributes common to love, as he had understood it, had no place in this sensation. As he had thought of it, love found its expression in the gratification of the need with which it had begun, or it ended, like his stories--unhappily. Then this could not be love. There was no ending of gratification and no ending of unhappiness to this. It was unending. Was that what his mother had meant he would learn?

Then, as he sat before the fire, wondering what new thing he had found, the bell rang again. It found no echo on this occasion. He slowly turned his head. They were not going to deceive him a second time. He rose quietly from his chair, crossed to the window, silently raised it and, as silently, looked out. There, below him, he saw a woman's hat--a hat with fur in it, cunningly twined through grey velvet,--a hat that he knew, a hat that he had often seen before.

He closed the window quietly and slowly made his way downstairs. Before he reached the end of the passage, the bell rang again. Then he opened the door.

It was the lady on whose behalf the fur coat had discharged the debt of honour.

She stepped right in with a little laugh of pleasure at finding him there; turned and waited while he closed the door behind them, then linked her arm in his as they mounted the stairs.

"I came," said she, "on chance. Aren't you glad to see me?"

There was just that fraction's pause before he replied--that pause into which a woman's mind leaps for answer. And how accurately she makes that leap, how surely she reaches the mental ground upon which you take your place, you will never be able truly to anticipate.

"Yes," said John, "I'm very glad."

"Then what is it?" she said quickly. "Are you writing?"

"No, I'm not. I've tried to, but I can't."

"Then are you expecting someone?"

He looked up at her, smiled, opened the door of his room, and bid her pass through.

"And is all this," said he, "because I paused a moment when you asked me if I was glad to see you?"

She seated herself easily in the chair to which she was accustomed. She began drawing the pins out of her hat, as a woman does when she feels at home. When the hat was free of her heaps of brown-red hair, she threw it carelessly upon the table, shook her head and lifted the hair from her forehead with her fingers. And John stood by with a smile, thinking how the faintest shadow of a word of question would make that hat fly back on to the head of brown-red hair, the hat-pins pierce the crown with hasty pride, and the little purse that lay upon the table alongside of them be clutched in an eager, scornful hand, as she would rise, full of dignity, to depart.

He let the smile fade away, and repeated his question.

"Yes," she said. "I thought when you didn't answer at once that you weren't very keen to see me."

"And if I said I wasn't very keen, would you go at once?"

Her eyebrows lifted high. She made a movement in her chair. One hand was already beginning to stretch out for the grey velvet hat.

"Like a shot!" she answered.

He nodded his head.

"That's what I thought," said John.

She rose quickly to her feet.

"If you want me to go, why don't you say so?"

He put his hands on her shoulders and seated her gently back again in the chair.

"But I don't want you to go," he replied. "I've got a lot of things I want to say to you."

"If you're going to talk evolution----" she began.

He laughed.

"It's something very like it," said he.

She gave a sigh of resignation, took out a packet of cigarettes, extracted one, lit it and inhaled the first breath deep--deep into her lungs.

"Well, go on," she said.

"Have you got plenty of cigarettes?"

"Yes, plenty to-day."

"Hadn't you yesterday?"

"No, Mother and I raked up all the cigarette ends out of the fireplaces, and I just had a penny for a packet of cigarette papers." She laughed.

This is the honesty of poverty. She would take no money from any man. For just as the virtue of wealth will bring out the evil of avarice, so will the evil of poverty bring out the virtue of self-respect. In this world, there is as much good that comes out of evil as ever stands by itself alone. This, in fact, is the need of evil, that out of it may lift the good.

"Well, what have you got to say?" she continued. "Get it over as quick as you can. I shan't understand half of it."

"You'll understand it all," said John. "You may not admit it. You don't admit your own honesty--you probably won't admit mine."

She screwed up her eyes at him. He said the most incomprehensible things. Of course, he was a crank. She knew that--took it for granted--but what did he mean by her honesty?

"I don't steal," she said. "But I owe fifteen pounds to my dressmaker, and thirteen to Derry & Toms, and six somewhere else, and I don't suppose they'll ever get paid. Do you call that honest?"

"I don't mean that sort of honesty. That's the sort of honesty that a dishonest man shields behind. You'd pay them if I gave you the money to pay them, or if anybody else gave you the money, or if you made the money. You meant to pay them, you probably thought you could pay them when you ordered the things."

She looked up at him and laughed.

"You poor old dear! I don't suppose you've got twopence in your pocket. You couldn't give it to me."

"I've got one and nine," said John. "But the point is, if I could give it you, you wouldn't take it. That's the honesty I'm talking about. From the standard at which you rate life, that's honesty, and you never depart from it. And, in a way, my standard has been much about the same--till now."

"Till now?" She echoed it in a little note of apprehension.

"Yes--till now. I thought these things were honest--now I've changed my standard, and I find them different, too."

"What do you mean?"

Her eyes looked far into his, and he stood there looking far back into hers.

"You don't love me, do you?" he said presently.

A pause preceded her answer.

"No," she said.

"And I've never told you I loved you?"

"No--never."

"And yet, does it strike you that there may be such a thing?"

"Oh, I suppose there is. Some people pretend they know all about it. I think you're the kindest and the best person I've ever met--that's enough for me."

"Would you marry me?" said John.

"No--never."

"Why not?"

"Because directly people marry--directly they find themselves bound, they look at each other in a different light. The question of whether it can last begins to creep in. With us, it doesn't matter. I come and see you whenever you want me to. If it doesn't last, then nobody's hurt by it--if it does, let it last as long as it can. I don't want it to end to-day--I might to-morrow. I might see someone I liked better."

"And then you'd go?"

"Most certainly."

"Well--suppose you came across someone with whom you knew it must last; from whom you expected to find those things which go on past time and all measuring of clocks, would you marry them?"

She came up close to him and laid her hands upon his shoulders.

"You can tell me straight out," she said gently. "One of us was bound to find it one of these days. I only hoped it would be me. You can tell me who she is. Go on."

John told her. This was what he had wanted the woman for--first his mother, then Mrs. Rowse, then the little typewriter, then even Jill herself. For it is a woman to whom a man must tell these things--nobody else will do; nobody else will understand.

And when she had heard it all, she looked up with the suspicion of tears in her eyes and smiled.

"Then I guess I'm the fly in the amber," she said. "It won't be a clear bit of stone till I'm gone. Isn't that what you mean?"

And, taking his face in her hands, she kissed his forehead. "You're a funny little boy," she said with a wry smile.

This was the box of bricks, the playing at her dignity. Every woman has them, and while some throw them at your head, the best make patterns--patterns of fine ladies and noble dames. It was a fine lady who would call him a funny little boy. It was a noble dame who would show him that she was not hurt. He had wanted her in his way, in their way--the way she wanted him as well. All men want some woman like that, and there are as good women to supply the need as there are bad ones who would shrink from it. And now, he wanted her no longer. She knew she had to bow her head to something that she could not understand, something that she could not supply. He loved. And they had so easily avoided it.

"Are you going to be married?" she enquired. She longed to ask what the other one was like.

John shrugged his shoulders.

"You don't know?"

"No, I don't know."

"Does she love you?"

"I couldn't tell you."

"You haven't asked her?"

"No--we haven't said a word about it."

She smiled.

"Then why do you send me away?"

"Because--I know, myself. There comes a time--I didn't know it--when you know--a time when you don't excuse yourself with the plea of humanity--when you wish to offer no excuse--when there is only one way, the way I'm choosing. I'm a crank, of course. I know you've called me that before. To you I'm a crank,--to heaps of other people as well. But in the back of this muddled head of mine, I've got an ideal--so has everyone else--so have you. But now I've found a means of expressing it. You say I'm in love--that's what you call it. I prefer just to say, I love--which is another matter altogether. People fall in and out of love like an india-rubber ball dancing on a spray of water. But this sort of thing must be always, and it may be only once or twice in your life that you find a means of expressing it. But it's there all the time. And one time it's a woman with dark hair and another it's a woman with gold--but the emotion--the heart of it is just the same. It's the same love--the love of the good--the love of the beautiful--the love of the thing which is clean through and through and through. And when you meet it, you'll sacrifice everything for it. And if you don't meet it, you'll go on hunting for it your life through--unless you lose heart, or lose character, or lose strength--then this wonderful ideal vanishes. You come to look for it less and less and less till at last you only seek for the other thing--what you call--falling in love."

"Do you think we all have this ideal?" she asked.

"Yes, every one of us."

"Then have I lost it?"

"No, I don't believe so. I saw tears in your eyes just now."