Chapter 3

I

1

As to Gyp Labelle, if she had known the part she played in their lives, which in the nature of things was not possible, she would have broken into that famous laugh of hers.

To her, at any rate, it would have seemed immensely, excruciatingly funny.

As the result of an exchange of two remarkably casual notes they met at Brown's for dinner. Brown's had occurred to both of them as a natural meeting-place. Cosgrave, it is true, had only dined there once and that free (as a friend of Brown's friend), but the impression made upon a stomach accustomed to Soho and tea-shop fare had been indelible. Stonehouse himself dined there as a matter of custom. Besides, there was a touch of sentiment to their choice--a rather bitter sharp-tasting sentiment like an aperitif.

Brown himself had aged considerably, and did not remember very well.

"Old friend of the doctor's, sir? Well, so am I. Getting on--getting on. But I'm waiting till I can squeeze my money's worth out of him. When's that knighthood coming, doctor? I want to be able to tell that story--as good a story as you'd read anywhere. He's got to keep me alive, sir, till it comes true."

He went off to the kitchen tittering to himself over an ancient joke which, together with his "feeling" for the psychological moment in the matter of roasts, was about all that was left him.

Stonehouse, his chin resting in his hand, studied the menu from which they had already chosen.

"When the last Honours List came out, he was quite serious and pathetic about it," he said. "Things move either too slowly or too quickly for old people. He does realize that I make quite a good story as I stand, but he wants the finishing touches--the King clasping me by the hand, or kissing me on both cheeks, or whatever he thinks happens on those occasions--and wedding bells as a grand finale."

"The place seems to have grown shabby," Cosgrave said. "Or perhaps it's only me."

"Oh, no. It is shabby. And perhaps you've noticed, they don't wait here as they used to."

Cosgrave looked directly at his companion, almost for the first time, and caught a spark in the eyes that stared into his--a rather dangerous spark, which cleverer people than himself had found difficult to make sure of. Then he laughed flatly.

"You can see how funny it is now----"

"I always did."

"--because you were so sure it would pan out--like this. How long is it?"

"About eight years."

"My word! Let's--let's look at one another and take stock."

Stonehouse sat back and bore the inspection with a faint smile. He knew himself, and how he impressed others. The eight years had done a great deal for him. His strength had cast its crudeness and had attained a certain grace--the ease of absolute control and tried confidence in itself. He still dressed badly--indifferently, rather--but his body had toned down to the level of the fine hands, which he held loosely clasped upon the table.

He looked at once very young and very fine drawn and, as Cosgrave thought, a little cruel.

"You seem--awfully well and prosperous, Robert. And a sight better looking."

Stonehouse laughed. All he said in reply was:

"And you look prosperous and ill. What was it? Enteric?"

Cosgrave shrugged his thin shoulders. He was still flamboyantly red-headed and generously freckled, but now that the first flush of excitement had ebbed, his face showed a parchment yellow. His eyes, wistful in their setting, were faded, as though a relentless tropical sun had drunk up their once vivid, boyish colouring.

"Oh yes, that and a few other trifles. I think I've housed most West African bugs in my time. Everyone had them, but I was such poor pasture that I got off better than most. Three of my superiors died of 'em, and I stepped right into their shoes. It pays, you see, if you can hold out. People like a fellow who isn't always clamouring to come home--and you bet I never did. But, finally, I took an overdue leave and a hunk of savings and trekked back. I'd always planned it--a good time, you know--but somehow it hasn't come off. I expect I left it too long. In the end I didn't really want to come at all--wanted to lie down and die, but hadn't the strength of mind to insist. I'd been in London a week before I wrote you--just drifting round--too weak-kneed to take the first step. I tore up that idiotic note three times."

"Well, as long as you posted the fourth effort," Stonehouse said, "it's all right."

They fell then unexpectedly into one of those difficult silences which beset the road of friends who have been separated too long. The past stood at their elbow like an importunate and shabby ghost. And yet it was all they had to lead them back into the old intimacy.

"We've got too much to say," Cosgrave broke out at last, with a painful effort, "too much ground to cover--and I dare say we don't want to cover it. If we'd written--but I never heard from you after that one letter--after Miss Christine's death."

"I was ill," Stonehouse explained, eating tranquilly. "I got through my finals with a temperature which would have astonished my examiners, and then I went to pieces altogether. Had to go into hospital myself. A nervous breakdown. Three months I had of it. They were very decent to me, and when I came out they got me a berth as ship's doctor on one of the smaller transatlantic liners. I got hold of things again and pulled them my way. But I didn't want to look back. My illness had made a definite break--I wanted to keep free."

Cosgrave nodded. He had been playing with his food, and now a look of disgust and weariness came into his thin face.

"I can understand that. I suppose it would have been better if I'd left well alone, and not written at all."

"It wouldn't have made much difference," Stonehouse said: "A week or two. Sooner or later we'd have run into one another. People who've been at school together always seem to. And you and I especially."

"I don't know. I was always a poor specimen--I never meant much to you."

Stonehouse looked up at him and smiled. This time it was an unmistakable smile and rather charming, like a warm line of light falling across his face.

"I was awfully glad to get your letter," he said. "I'd begun to worry rather."

Cosgrave flushed up.

"That's--that's about the nicest thing that's happened to me for a long time. I'd probably cry with pleasure--only I don't seem able to feel much anyway. It's those damn bugs, I suppose!"

"I'll pull you out of that."

"Got me diagnosed already?"

"It's not very difficult."

"I suppose--I suppose you're an awful swell, Stonehouse."

"Not yet. I'm better at my job than a great many men who are swells. But I'm young--that'll cure itself. Oh, yes--I'm all right. Things have gone on coming my way. I'll tell you about it sometime."

Cosgrave's eyes had rounded with their old solemn admiration.

"A fashionable West-End surgeon--oh, my word! I say, have you got a bed-side manner tucked away somewhere?"

"No. That's not fashionable for one thing, and for another, it wouldn't suit my style. I'm not interested in people. I'm interested in their diseases. They know it, and rather like it." A touch of chill scorn showed itself for a moment in his face. "They're frightened of me. I'm as good as an electric shock to their lethargic, overfed carcasses. They can't get over a young man with his way to make who wipes his boots on them. They have to come back for more."

Cosgrave gave his little toneless laugh.

"I wish to God you'd frighten me. You know, when I felt how rotten I was I thought of you. You always bucked me up--I believe I had a fool idea that I'd find you in some scrubby suburban practice. Shows the bugs must have got into my brain too, doesn't it? Now I suppose I'll have to ask you to reduce your fees."

"I'll let you down easy. Say, a guinea a consultation!"

"I could manage that--if you don't want to consult too often. I've got my bit saved. Not much to squander on out there, except whisky, and I never took to that. Besides--my father's dead. He didn't mean to leave me his money--you know how he loathed me--but there was a mix-up over the will that was to cut me out--not properly witnessed or something. Anyhow, I came out into a few thousand. Rather a joke on the old man, wasn't it?"

"One might almost hope for another life if one were sure he were grinding his teeth over it."

A faint perplexity flickered across the sallow face.

"Oh, I don't know. I don't seem to bear him any particular grudge now. Perhaps it would be better if I could. When one's young one judges very harshly. Parents and kids don't understand each other--not really--and don't always love each other either, if the truth were known. Why should they? The old man and I were like strangers tied to one another by the leg. I used to think if I could pay him back for all the beastly times he gave me I'd die happy. But I don't feel like that now. I expect he was pretty miserable himself. There's too much of that sort of thing for us to wish it on to one another."

"You're very tolerant," Stonehouse said. "I'm not. But then I haven't inherited anything." He stopped abruptly and his manner hardened. But Cosgrave did not pursue the subject. His interest had suddenly slumped into what was evidently an habitual apathy, and only when they had paid their bill and drifted out into the street did he revert for a moment to the past.

"And the Gang--and Frances Wilmot?" he asked. He looked shyly at his companion's profile, which showed up for a moment in a bold, tranquil outline against the lamplight. It betrayed nothing.

"We might walk back to my rooms and talk in peace. Oh--Francey Wilmot? I don't know much. She went abroad--finished her course very late--she was always a bit of a dilettante. People with money usually are."

Cosgrave said no more. He knew all he wanted to know. It saddened him. Somehow he had counted on that half-divined romance, had played with it in his fancy as with a kind of vicarious happiness.

3

On board the S.S. _Launceston_ there had arrived, an hour before sailing, an American gentleman--a certain Mr. Horace Fletcher, who, having been called home suddenly, had had to take what accommodation he could get on the first available boat. Two days later he had lain unconscious, strapped to the captain's table, whilst the ship's doctor, a young man, himself in the horrible throes of seasickness, had performed a radical operation for acute mastoiditis. There had been no facilities. The whole thing had been in the last degree makeshift. The half-trained stewardess had held his instruments ready for him, and the sea-sickness, comic in retrospect, had weighed heavily against Mr. Fletcher's chance of seeing land again. Nevertheless, the eminent New York surgeon, consulted at the first opportunity, had pronounced the operation a neat performance--under the circumstances a masterpiece.

It was the nearest possible approach to a medical advertisement. Mr. Fletcher was a member of a well-known New York family, and the papers had given the story, with fantastic details as to the ship's doctor's career, a first-page prominence. Mr. Fletcher himself had proved to be both generous and grateful. In assessing the value of his own life at 1,000 pounds, he had argued with good humour and good sense, he had erred on the side of modesty, and Robert Stonehouse, having weighed the argument gravely, had accepted its practical conclusion as just and reasonable. He had taken rooms, thereupon, if not actually in Harley Street, at least under the ramparts, fitted them out with the most modern surgical appliances that his capital allowed, and had sat down to wait. Fortunately he had learnt the art of starving before. He slept in a garret, and the bottom drawer of the handsome mahogany desk in his consulting-room knew the grim secret of his mid-day meals. But in six months the tide had turned. Doctors had remembered him from his hospital days when, if they had not liked him, they had learnt to respect his genius and his courage, and had sent him patients. The patients themselves, oddly enough, took a fancy to this gaunt, very serious young man, who so obviously cared nothing at all about them, but whose interest in their diseases was almost passionate. And within two years the tide had brought him in sight of land.

This was what he had meant by "getting hold of things again and pulling them his way." There was perhaps something rather simple in a theory of life which had necessitated so much suffering on the part of Mr. Fletcher in order that Dr. Stonehouse might take the first long stride in his career. But Cosgrave, listening to Stonehouse's own account of the incident, saw in it only an example of a strange, inexorable truth. What men called "Fate" was the shadow of themselves. They imposed their characters upon events, significant or insignificant, willingly or unwillingly. Beyond that there was no such thing as Fate at all.

They stepped back from the crowd into the shelter of the Piccadilly Tube. They had been walking the streets for an hour, and as much of their lives as they were able to tell one another had been told. Now they were both baffled and tired out. Of what had really happened to them they could say nothing, and their memories, disinterred in a kind of desperate haste ("Do you remember that row with Dickson about my hair, Robert?") had crumbled, after a moment's apparent vitality, into a heap of dust. It was all too utterly dead--too unreal to both of them. The things that had mattered so much, which had seemed so laughable or so tragic, were like the repetition of a story in which they could only force a polite interest. Their laughter, their exclamations, sounded shallow and insincere.

And yet it was borne in upon them that they did still care for one another. They had had no other friendship to compare with this. Strictly speaking, there had been no other friends. There had been acquaintances--people whom you talked to because you worked with them.

Robert Stonehouse had always known his own loneliness. His patients believed in him; his colleagues respected him. Their knowledge of him went no further than the operating theatre where they knew him best. He had reckoned loneliness as an asset. But to feel it, as he felt it now beneath this stilted exchange, was to become aware of a dull, stupid pain. He found himself staring over the heads of the people, and wishing that Cosgrave had never come back. And Cosgrave said gently, as though he had read his thought and had made up his mind to have done with insincerities:

"You're not to bother about me, Robert. It's been jolly, seeing you again and all that, but we'd better let it end here. It always puzzled me--your caring, you know, about a hapless fellow like myself. It's against your real principles. I'm a dead weight. I couldn't give anyone a solitary water-tight reason for my being alive. I think you did it because you'd got your teeth into me by accident and couldn't let go. I don't want you to get your teeth into me again."

"I don't believe," Stonehouse said, with an impatient laugh, "that I ever let go at all."

His attention fixed itself on the illuminated sign that hung from the portico of the Olympic Theatre opposite, and mechanically he began to spell out the flaming letters:

"Gyp Labelle--Gyp Labelle!" At first the name scarcely reached his consciousness, but in some strange way it focused his disquiet. It was as though for a long time past he too had been indefinitely ill, and now at an exasperating touch the poisoned blood rushed to a head of pain. He felt Cosgrave plucking at his sleeve, fretfully like a sick child, raised to a sudden interest.

"I say, Stonehouse, don't you remember?"

"The Circus? Yes, I was just thinking about it. It's not likely to be the same though."

"Why not? She was a nailer. Oh--but you didn't think so, did you? It was the woman on the horse--the big barmaid person--I forget her name--Madame--Madame----"

It was ridiculous--but even now it annoyed him to be reminded of her essential vulgarity. There was a glamour--almost a halo about her memory because of all that he had felt for her. A silly boy's passion. But he would never feel like that again.

"Well, she could ride, anyhow. I don't know what your long-legged favourite was good for."

"She made me laugh," Cosgrave said. He asked after a moment: "Have you ever wanted anything so much as you wanted to go to that Circus, Stonehouse?"

"Oh, yes--crowds of things!"

"I don't believe it somehow. I know I haven't. Oh, I say, I wish I could want again like that--anything--to get drunk--to go to the dogs--anything in the world. It's this damnable not wanting. Do you know I've been trying every night this week to drift into that show--just to see if it were really that funny kid. I felt I ought to want to. Why, even the fellows down in Angola had heard of her."

"She's probably well known in hotter places than that," Stonehouse remarked.

"Yes--so I gathered. That's what made them so keen. They used to talk of her--telling the wildest yarns, as though it did them good just to think there was someone left alive who had so much go in them. Queer, isn't it? Do you remember what a susceptible chap I used to be--that poor little Connie--what's-her-name, whom I nearly scared out of her five senses? Well, I've not cared a snap for any woman since then. And I want to--I want to. I'd be so awfully happy if I could only care for some nice girl and marry her. There was someone on the boat--such a jolly good sort--and I think if I only could have cared she'd have cared too. But I couldn't. I tried to work myself up--but it was like scratching on a dead nerve--as though something vital had gone clean out of me."

His voice cracked. Stonehouse, startled from his own reflections, became aware that Cosgrave, whose apathy had hung about them like a fog, hiding them from each other, was on the point of tears--of breaking down helplessly in the crowded entrance. And instantly their old relationship was re-born. He took him by the arm, sternly, authoritatively, as he had always done when little Rufus Cosgrave had begun to flag or cry.

"You're coming home with me. When you're fit enough we'll do the show opposite and make a night of it. We'll see what going to the devil can do for you."

"Perhaps she'd make me laugh again," Cosgrave said, quavering hysterically.

4

At any rate he had kept faith with himself. That theatre-night with Frances Wilmot had been the first and last until now, and now assuredly he did not care any more. But it made him remember. How intoxicated he had been! He had walked home like a man translated into a strange country--words had rushed past his ears in floods of music, and the silver and black streets had been magic-built. Was it his youth, or had Francey, dancing before him, her head lifted to catch unearthly harmonies, thrown a spell over his judgment? She had gone, and he was older--but he had a feeling that the disillusionment was not only in himself. It was in the atmosphere about him--in the stale air, stamped on the stereotyped gilt and plush of the shabby theatre and on the faces of the people. He wondered whether they had all grown too old. Perhaps the spirit which had driven them into these dark boxes to gaze open-mouthed, crying or laughing, through a peep-hole into a world of ideal happiness, or even ideal sorrow, was dead and gone like their faith in God and every other futile shadow which they had tried to interpose between themselves and truth. This that remained was perhaps no more than a tradition--a convention. When people were bored or unhappy they said: "Let's go to a theatre!" and when they came out they wondered why they had been, or what they had hoped for.

Reality was beginning to press hard on men. It was driving them into an iron cul-de-sac, from which there was no escape. Suicide and madness, obscure and hideous maladies of the brain herded in it. Perhaps, after all, there had been some value in those old fairy stories. And he remembered, with a faint movement of impatience, Francey Wilmot's final shaft: "If there isn't a God you'll have to make one up." But even if a man were to juggle with his own integrity, turn charlatan, there was no faith-serum which you could inject into a patient's veins.

Cosgrave sat limply in his stall, and by the reflected light from the stage Stonehouse could see his look of wan indifference. He was no better. All day long he lay on his bed in the small spare room Robert had given him and stared up at the white ceiling. There was a crack, running zig-zag from the window to the door, which reminded him, so he said, of a river in Angola, a beastly slimy thing trailing through mosquito-infested swamps and villainous-tangled jungles. When he dozed it became real, and he felt the heat descend on him like a sticky hand, and heard the menacing drone of the mosquitoes and the splash of oars as unfriendly natives who had tracked him along the water's edge shot out suddenly from under the shadow of the mango trees in their long boats--deadly and swift as striking adders.

And then, near the door, the river broke off--poured into the open sea--or fell over a cataract--he did not know what--and he woke up with a sweating start and took his medicine. He was so painstakingly docile about his medicine that Robert Stonehouse guessed he had no faith in it. Sometimes indeed he had an idea that Cosgrave was rather sorry for him, very much as old people are sorry for the young, knowing the end to all their enthusiasms. It was as though he had travelled ahead, and had found out how meaningless everything was, even his clever friend's strength and cleverness.

So he did not get better. And the forces that Robert Stonehouse had counted on had failed. He had been a successful physician outside his specialty and his sheer indifference to his patients as human beings had been one of his chief weapons. He braced them, imposing his sense of values so that their own sufferings became insignificant, and they ceased to worry so much about themselves. But with Cosgrave he was not indifferent. Some indefinable element of emotion had been thrown into the scales, upsetting the delicate balance of his judgment.

And his old influence had gone too. It had failed him from that moment in Connie Edwards' room when suddenly Cosgrave had realized the general futility of things.

"I'll see him through all the same," Stonehouse thought, with a kind of violence, "I'll pull him through."

After the first few moments he had ignored the scene before him. It was boring--imbecile. Even to him, with his contempt for the average of human intelligence, it seemed incredible that the gyrating of a few half-naked women and the silly obscenities of a comedian dressed in a humourless caricature of a gentleman should hold the attention of sane men for a minute. Now abruptly the orchestra caught hold of him, shook him and dragged him back. It was playing something which he had heard before--on a street barrel-organ, and which he disliked now with an intensity for which he could give no reason. It was perhaps because he wanted to remain aloof and indifferent, and because it would not let him be. It destroyed his isolation. His pulse caught up its beat like the rest. His personality lost outline--merging itself into the cumbrous uncouth being of the audience.

Though it was a rhythm rather than a tune it was not rag-time. Rag-time Stonehouse appreciated. He recognized it as a symptom of the _mal du siecle_, a deliberate break with the natural rhythm of life, a desperate ennui, the hysterical pressure upon an aching cancer. Ragtime twitched at the nerves. This thing jostled you, bustled you. It was a shout--a caper--the ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay of its day, riotous and vulgar. It was the sort of thing coster-women danced to on the pavements of Epsom on Derby night.

The stage, set with a stereotyped drawing-room, was empty as the curtain rose. Two hands, dead white under their load of emeralds, held the black hangings over the centre doorway--then parted them brusquely. Stonehouse heard the audience stir in their seats, but there was only a faint applause. No one had come to the theatre for any other purpose than to see her, but they knew her history. And, after all, they were respectable people.

Cosgrave caught him by the arm.

"Oh, my word--it's her right enough!"

She stood there, motionless, her fair head with its monstrous crest of many-coloured ostrich feathers flaming against the dead background. Her dress was impudent. It winked at its own transparent pretence at covering a body which was, in fact, too slender, too nervously alive to be quite beautiful (Stonehouse remembered her legs--the long, thin legs in the parti-coloured tights, like sticks of peppermint, belabouring the rotund sides of her imperturbable pony). But her jewels clothed her. Their authentic fire seemed to blaze out of herself--to be fed by her. And each one of them, no doubt, had its romance--its scandal. That rope of pearls in itself was a king's ransom. People nudged each other. It was part of the show that she should flaunt them.

She had been a plain child, and now, if she was really pretty at all, it was after the fashion of most French women, without right or reason, by force of some secret magnetism that was not even physical. Her wide mouth was open in a rather vacant, childish smile, and she was looking up towards the gallery as though she were expecting something. "Hallo, everyone!" she said tentatively, gaily. They stared back at her, stolid and antagonistic, defying her. She began to laugh then, as she laughed every night at the same moment, spontaneously, shrilly, helplessly, until suddenly she had them. It was like a whirlwind. It spared no one. They were like dead leaves dancing helplessly in its midst. Even Stonehouse felt it at his throat, a choking, senseless laughter.

He saw Cosgrave lean forward, and in the half light he had a queer, startled look. With his thick red hair and small white face he might have been some sick thing of the woods scenting the air in answer to far-off familiar piping's. He made Robert Stonehouse see the faun in Frances Wilmot's room, the room itself and Frances Wilmot, with her chin resting in her hands, gazing into the fire. The picture was gone almost before he knew what he had seen. But it was knife-sharp. It was as though a hand fumbling over a blank wall had touched by accident a secret spring and a door had flown wide open, closing instantly.

"I'm Gyp Labelle; If you dance with me You must dance to my tune Whatever it be."

She jumped into the incessant music as a child jumps into a whirling skipping-rope. She had a quaint French accent, but she couldn't sing. She had no voice. And after that one doggerel verse she made a gesture of good-humoured contempt and danced. But she couldn't dance either. It was a wild gymnastic--a display of incredible, riotous energy, the delirious caperings of a gutter-urchin caught in the midst of some gutter-urchin's windfall by a jolly tune. A long-haired youth leapt on to the stage from the stage-box, and caught her by the waist and swung her about him and over his shoulder so that her plumes swept the ground and the great chain of pearls made a circle of white light about them both.

"Those pearls!" Stonehouse heard a man behind him say loudly. "Prince Frederick gave them to her. And then he shot himself. They belonged to the family. He had no right, of course, but she wanted them."

He could feel Cosgrave stir impatiently.

It went on, as it seemed to him, for an incredible length of time. It was like a prairie fire that spread and blazed up, higher and brighter. And there was no escape. He had a queer conviction that his was the only static spirit in the whole theatre, that secretly, in their hearts, the audience had flung themselves into the riot with her, the oldest and staidest of them, as perhaps they had often wanted to do when they heard a jolly tune like that. It was artless, graceless. One only needed to let oneself go.

"I'm Gyp Labelle, Come dance with me."

The jaded disgust and weariness were gone. Something had come into the theatre that had not been there before. Nothing mattered either so much or so little. The main business was to have a good time somehow--not to worry or care.

She had whirled catherine-wheel fashion, head over heels from end to end of the stage. The long-haired youth swept the hair from his hot, blue-jowled face in time to catch her, and they stood side by side, she with her thin arms stretched up straight in a gesture of triumph, her lips still parted in that curiously empty, expectant smile.

Then it was over. Once the curtain rose to perfunctory applause. People settled back in their seats, or prepared to go. It was as though the fire had been withdrawn from a molten metal which began instantly to harden. A woman next to Stonehouse tittered.

"So vulgar and silly--I don't know what people see in her."

"I want to get away," Cosgrave said sharply. "It's this beastly closeness."

He looked and walked as though he had been drinking.

Although the show was not over, the majority of the audience had begun to stream out. Two men who loitered in the gangway in front of Stonehouse exchanged laconic comments.

"A live wire, eh, what?"

For some reason or other Stonehouse saw clearly and remembered afterwards the face of the man who answered. It was bloated and full of a weary, humorous intelligence.

"Life itself, my dear fellow, life itself!"

5

Cosgrave scarcely answered his companion's comments. He withdrew suddenly into himself, and after that he shirked the subject, understandably enough, for if he had had illusions on her account they must have been effectively shattered. But also he ceased to lie all day on his bed and stare up at the mosquito-infested river of his nightmare. He grew restless and shy, as though he were engaged with secret business of his own of which Stonehouse knew nothing, and of which he could say nothing. Yet Stonehouse had caught his eyes fixed on him with the doubtful, rather wistful earnestness of a child trying to make up its mind to confide. (There was still something pathetically young about Rufus Cosgrave. Now that his body was growing stronger, youth peered out of his wan face like a famished prisoner demanding liberty.)

What he did with himself during the long hours when Stonehouse was in his consulting-room or on his rounds Stonehouse never asked. At night he sat at the study window of his friend's flat (shabby and high up since all spare money was diverted to other and better purposes), and looked over the roofs of the houses opposite, smoking and watching the dull red glow that rose up from the blazing theatres westwards.

"It is a fire," he said once, "and all the cold, tired people in London come to warm their hands at it."

Robert Stonehouse went on with his writing under the lamplight.

"Are you cold?"

"Not now." He added unexpectedly: "You think I'd be all right, don't you, if only you could have a go at my tonsils or my adenoids? I believe you're just waiting to have a go at them."

"Your tonsils are septic," Stonehouse agreed gravely. "I told you so, but I wouldn't advise anything drastic until you're stronger. We'll think about it in a month or two. You're better already."

Cosgrave chuckled to himself. In the shadow in which he sat the chuckle sounded elfish and almost mocking.

"Oh, yes, I'm better!"

Stonehouse took his first holiday for three years, and carried Cosgrave off with him to a rough shooting-box in the Highlands lent him by a grateful and sporting patient, and for a week they tramped the moors together and stalked deer and fished in the salmon river that ran in and out among the desolate hills. The place was little more than a shepherd's cottage, growing grey and stubborn as a rock out of the heather, and beyond that proffered them occasionally by a morose and distrustful gillie they had no help or other companionship. They won their food for themselves, cooked it by the smoking fire, and washed heroically in the icy river water. A sting of winter was already in the wind and a melancholy and bitter rain swept the hills, giving way at evening to unearthly sunsets. They saw themselves as pioneers at the world's end. And Stonehouse, who had calculated its effect on Cosgrave, was himself caught up in the fierce, rough charm of that daily life. He who had never played since that circus night played now in passionate earnest. He proved a good shot, and, for all his inexperience, an indomitable and clever hunter. His close-confined physical energy could not shake itself. He liked the long and dogged pursuit, the cruel, often fruitless struggle up the mountain-sides, the patient waiting, the triumph of that final shot from a hand unshaken by excitement or fatigue. A stag showing itself for an instant against the sky-line called up all the stubborn purpose in him; then he would not turn back until either his quarry had fallen to him, or night had swallowed them both.

And Cosgrave, half forgotten, tagged docilely at his heels, or lay in the wet heather on the crest of a hill overlooking the world, and watched and waited with strange, wide-open eyes. But he never gave the signal. He shot nothing. His failure seemed to amuse and even please him. A faint, excited colour came into his cheeks, lashed up by the wind and rain. And once, a hare running out from under his feet, he gave a wild "halloo!" like a boy and set off in pursuit, headlong down the stony hillside, his gun at full cock, threatening indiscriminate destruction.

"You might have killed yourself," Robert said angrily. But Cosgrave laughed, his eyes narrowed to blue-grey slits as though he did not want Stonehouse to see all that was in them.

"I shouldn't have minded," he panted, "going off on the crest like that--I wanted to run--I forgot."

"Well, for the Lord's sake, don't forget."

But for an instant at least he knew what Cosgrave meant. It had been the sight of that downward rushing hill and the sudden choking exultation. He had felt it too--that night in Acacia Grove in pursuit of the Greatest Show--and once again. He could smell the scent of the trees and the young grass blowing in his face.

And at the bottom there had been a mysterious wood like a deep, green pool.

Then on the eighth day Cosgrave disappeared. He had set out in the early morning for the nearest station to fetch their letters and fresh provisions, and at dusk a village youth reached Stonehouse with a note which had been scrawled in such haste that it was almost illegible. It was as though Cosgrave had yielded suddenly and utterly to a prolonged pressure.

He had to go back to town. It was something urgent. Stonehouse was not to bother. He would be all right now.

The next day Stonehouse stalked and brought down his first "Royal." This time the chase had cost him every ounce of his endurance, and in the chill dusk he stood watching the gillie at his work on the lovely body (still so warm and lissom that one could almost see the last sorrowful heaving of its golden flanks) with a kind of stolid triumph as though now he had wiped out that other failure, for he realized that he had been both too sanguine and too impatient. When you were angling a man with a sick brain back to health, you had to go slowly--delicately.

"It's because I care," he thought, half amused and half angry. "And why do I care? It's as he said--a rotten habit."

But he returned to town. He tracked Cosgrave to his former lodging-house, where a stout, heavily-breathing landlady showed every readiness to be communicative and helpful.

"Yes, sir--he's here again--I think he was expecting you--mentioned your name--he's out now and won't be back till late--dinner at the Carlton, he said. If you'd like to leave a note, sir----"

She led him upstairs and watched him with a fat amusement as he stood silent and frowning on the threshold.

"It _is_ a fair mess," she admitted blandly. "I was just trying to get things a bit together when you rang, sir. I'm to throw away all that old stuff, he said. A reg'lar new start he's making--_and_ a lively one, I don't think. Theatres and supper parties ever since he's been back, sir, and right glad I've been to see it, though I don't 'old with carryings-on, in a general way. But after them there tropiks he'd need a change. He was that down, sir, when he first came, I didn't know what to think."

The room might have belonged to a young dandy returned to London from the wilds of Central Africa. It was littered with half-open boxes, new suits, a disorderly regiment of shining, unworn boots and shoes, a pile of ties that must have been chosen for sheer expensiveness. (Stonehouse remembered the spotted affair with which Cosgrave had wooed Connie Edward's approval.) The shabby suit in which Stonehouse had first met him had been flung with the other cast-offs into a far corner. It was all very young and reckless and jolly. One could see the owner, as he rampaged about the room, whistling and cursing in a good-humoured haste.

"'Ere's 'is writing-table; I'll just make room for you, sir----"

He stopped her.

"It doesn't matter. If he's to be at the Carlton I'll probably look him up myself."

"Dining early, he said, sir--seven o'clock."

"Yes--thank you."

A folded, grey-tinted letter lay half hidden in the general melee. It had a bold, irrepressible look, as though it were aware of having blown the room to smithereens and was rather amused. Stonehouse could see the large, sprawling hand that covered it. He touched it, not knowing why--nor yet that he was angry. Something that had been asleep in him for a long time stirred uneasily and stretched itself.

"Ladies"--his companion simpered---"always the ladies, sir."

Stonehouse laughed.

An hour later he was waiting for Cosgrave in the Carlton lounge. He had never been in the place before--or in any place like it--and it confused and astonished him. He was like a monk who had come unprepared into the crude noise and glitter of a society desperately pleasure-seeking. He could regard the men and women round him with contempt, but not with indifference, for they represented a force against which he had not yet tried himself except in theory. And they set a new standard. Here his life and his attainments were of no account. What mattered was that he wore his travelling clothes, and that he stood stockily in the gangway like a man who does not know what is expected of him. It was ridiculous, but it was true that he became ashamed.

But he held his ground stubbornly. He was not aware of any definite plan or expectation. If he had asked himself what he intended he would have said he meant to look after Cosgrave, who was in a bad way. As a friend and as a doctor he had the right. He would not have admitted that his own personality had become involved, that he had felt himself obscurely challenged.

Then he saw Cosgrave. He saw him before his companion, though for everyone else she obscured him utterly. She walked a few steps ahead, a bizarre, fantastic figure, her fair head with its deep band of diamonds lifted audaciously, the same fixed smile of childish expectancy on her oval, painted face. Her dress had left vulgarity behind. It was too much a part of herself--in its way too genuine--to be merely laughable. It was like her execrable dancing, the expression of an exuberant, inexhaustible life. As she walked, with short impatient steps, she swayed the great ostrich-feather fan and twisted her rope of pearls between her slender fingers. The open stare that greeted her seemed to amuse and please her.

And Cosgrave. Saville Row, Stonehouse reflected rapidly and contemptuously, must have been bribed to have turned out such perfection at such short notice. Too much perfection and too new. An upstart young rake. No, not quite that, either. Pain had lent an elusive beauty to the plain and freckled face, and happiness had made it lovable. It was obvious that he was trying to suppress his pride and astonishment at himself and not succeeding. The corners of his mouth quivered shyly and self-consciously, and the wide-open eyes were fixed with an engaging steadfastness on the figure in front of him as though he knew that if he looked to the right or left he would give himself away altogether. Stonehouse could almost hear his voice, high-pitched and boyish.

"Oh, I say, Robert, isn't it wonderful--isn't she splendid?"

Stonehouse himself stood right across their path. It was accidental, and now he could not move. He had grown to rely too much on his emotional inaccessibility, and the violence and suddenness of his anger transfixed him. This woman had trapped Cosgrave. She had caught him in the dangerous moment of convalescence--in that rebound from inertia which carries men to an excess incredible to their normal conscience. And she was infamous. She had broken one man after another.

She could not have overlooked Stonehouse. Apart from his conspicuous clothes, his immobility and white-set face must have inevitably drawn her attention to him. Her eyes, very blue and shadowless, met his stare with a kind of bonhomie--almost a Masonic understanding--and the uncompromising antagonism that replied seemed to check her. She hesitated, then as he at last stood back, passed on still smiling, but mechanically, as though something had surprised her into forgetting why she smiled.

Cosgrave followed her. He brushed against Stonehouse without recognition.

In that moment Stonehouse's anger ran away with him. Thrusting aside the protests of a puzzled and rather frightened waiter he chose a table that faced them both. Cosgrave, blindly absorbed, never looked towards him, but twice she met his eyes, still with a faintly puzzled amusement, as though every moment she expected to penetrate a mask of crude enmity to a no less crude admiration and desire. Then she spoke to Cosgrave laughingly, as Stonehouse knew, with the light curiosity of a woman who has met something tantalizingly novel, and Cosgrave turned, uttered an exclamation, and a moment later came across. He acted like a man suffering from aphasia. He seemed totally oblivious of the immediate past. They might have been casual friends who had met casually. He was radiant.

"What luck your being here. I didn't know you went in for frivolity of this sort--if you call it frivolous dining in solitary state. Come over and join us. We're just having a bite before the show. You remember Mademoiselle Labelle, don't you?"

Stonehouse nodded assent. He left his table at once. He seemed frigidly composed, but he was sure that she would not be deceived. She knew too much about men--that was her business--and she meant to pay him out, make him seem crude and absurd in his own eyes.

"It's Stonehouse--my old friend--I was telling you about him--we don't need to introduce you, Mademoiselle."

She gave him her hand, palm down, to kiss, and he turned it over deliberately. The fingers were loaded to the knuckles. He reflected that each of these stones had its history, tragic, comic or merely sordid. He let her hand drop. He saw that the affront had not touched her. Perhaps others had begun like that.

"_Ce cher docteur_--'e don't like me," she complained pathetically to Cosgrave. "'E sit opposite to me and glare like a 'ungry tiger. Believe me, I grow quite cold with fear. Tell me why you don't like me, Monsieur?"

"He was only wanting to be asked," Cosgrave broke in with his high, excited laugh. "Why, he introduced us. I was all down and out--couldn't decide which bridge to chuck myself off from--and he lugged me into your show. He said----"

"Well, what 'e say?"

Cosgrave blushed.

"He said: 'Let's see what going to the devil can do for you.'"

She jerked a jewelled thumb at him, appealing to Stonehouse.

"'E 'as cheek, that young man. 'E send in 'is card to my dressing-room, saying 'e got to meet me. _Comme ca_! As though anyone could just walk in! I was curious to see a young man with cheek like that. So I let 'im come. _Et nous voila_!" She leant across to Stonehouse, speaking confidentially, earnestly. "But you--_c'est autre chose_--_monsieur est bien range_--an artist perhaps for all that--'e see me dance and think perhaps, '_Voyons_--she cannot dance at all--nor sing--nor nozzings. Just enjoy 'erself.' You think I don't deserve all I get, _hein_?"

"I think," said Stonehouse smiling, "that there are others in your profession less fortunate, Mademoiselle."

As, for instance, that woman in the hospital--Frances Wilmot's protegee. Queer how the memory of that ruined, frightened face peering over the bed-clothes and begging for life should come back to him after eight years. And yet the connexion was obvious enough. He looked at Mademoiselle Labelle with a new interest. It was impossible that she should have read his thoughts, but he knew by the little twist of her red mouth that she had understood his insult. She seemed to ponder over it dispassionately.

"That's true--_c'est bien vrai, ca_. I 'ave been lucky. I shall always be lucky. Everybody knows that. They say: 'Our Gyp, she will 'ave a good time at 'er funeral.' No, no. Monsieur Rufus, I will not drink. If I drink I might dance--'ere on this table--and ze company is so ver' respectable. Listen." She laid her hand on Stonehouse's arm as unconsciously as though he had been an old friend. "Listen. They play ze 'Gyp Gal-lop.' That is because I am 'ere. Ze conductor, 'e know me--he like 'is leetle joke. _C'est drole_--every time I 'ear it played I want to get up and dance and dance----" She hummed under her breath, beating time with her cigarette.

"I'm Gyp Labelle; If you dance with me. . . ."

Obviously she knew that the severely elegant men and women on either hand watched her with a covert, chilly hostility. But there was something oddly simple in her acceptance of their attitude. Therein, no doubt, lay some of her power. She was herself. She didn't care. She was too strong. She had ruined people like that--people every whit as hostile, and self-assured, and respectable--and had gone free without a scratch. She could afford to laugh at them, to ignore them, as it pleased her.

(And what would Frances Wilmot with her wrong-headed toleration, have urged in extenuation? A hard life, perhaps? Stonehouse smiled ironically at himself. The old quarrel was like an ineradicable drop of poison in the blood.)

She smoked incessantly. She ate very little. And as time went on she seemed to draw away from the two men into a kind of secret ecstasy of enjoyment like some fierce animal scenting freedom. The sentences she dropped were shallow, impatient, even stupid. And yet there was Rufus Cosgrave with his hungry eyes fixed on her, trapped by the nameless force that lay behind her triviality, her daring commonness.

She rose to go at last.

"And you take him with you, _Monsieur le docteur_. If 'e sit many more nights in ze front row 'e find out, too, I can't dance, and then I break my 'eart. Besides, I 'ave my reputation to think of in this ver' propaire England, _hein_?"

"I'm coming with you," Cosgrave said quietly.

She shrugged her shoulder.

"_Eh bien_, what can I do? They are all ze same. Good-bye, _Monsieur le docteur_. You scare me stiff. But I like you. Nest time I 'ave ze tummy-ache I ring you up.

"I shouldn't--if I were you."

"Why? You give me poison, p'raps?"

"I might," he said.

II

1

So Rufus Cosgrave disappeared, like an insignificant chip of wood sucked into a whirlpool, and this time Stonehouse made no attempt to plunge in after him. With other advanced and energetic men of his profession he stood committed to a new enterprise--the creation of a private hospital, which was to be a model to the hospitals of the world--and he had no time to waste on a fool who wanted to ruin himself. But though he never thought of Cosgrave, he could not altogether forget him. At night he found himself turning instinctively towards the window where the delicate, rather plaintive profile had shown faintly against the glow of the streets, and the empty frame caused him a sense of unrest, almost of insecurity, as though a ghost had risen to convince him that the dead are never quite dead, and then had vanished.

He took to returning to his consulting-rooms, where he regained his balance and his normal outlook. The sober reality of the place thrust ghosts out-of-doors. Here was no lingering shadow of poverty to recall them. The bright, cold instruments in their glass cases, the neatly ordered japanned tables, the cunning array of lights were there to remind him that he was a man who had made a record career for himself and who was going farther. In the day-time he took them as a matter of course, but now he regarded them rather solemnly. He went from one to another, handling them, testing them, switching the lights of special electrical devices on and off, like a boy with a new and serious plaything. There was no one to laugh at him, and he did not laugh at himself. He stood in the midst of his possessions, a little insolently, with his head up, as though he were calling them up one by one to bear him witness. He was self-made. He had torn his life out of the teeth of circumstance. There was not an instrument, not a chair or table in the lofty, dignified room that he had not paid for with sweat and sacrifice and deprivation. No one had given him help that he had not earned. Even in himself he had been handicapped. The boy he had been had wanted things terribly--silly, useless, gaudy things that would have ruined him as they had ruined his father. He remembered how in the twilight of Acacia Grove he had listened to the music of far-off processions, and had longed to run to meet them and march with the jolly, singing people, and how once it had all come true, and he had lied and stolen.

Once only. Then he had stamped temptation under foot. He had become master of himself. And now he was not tempted any more by foolish desires. He meant to do work that would put him in the front rank of big men.

And, thinking of the old struggle, he threw out his hand, as he had done that night when he had met Francey Wilmot, and clenched the slender, powerful fingers as though he had life by the throat, smiling a little in the cold, rather cruel way that Cosgrave knew--a theatrical gesture, had it been less passionately sincere.

It was in his consulting-room that Cosgrave found him after a prolonged, muddle-headed search that had lasted till close on midnight. Cosgrave himself was drunk--less with wine than with a kind of heady exhilaration that made him in turn maudlingly sentimental or recklessly hilarious. And yet there was a definite and serious purpose in his coming--a rather pathetic desire to "put himself right," to get Stonehouse, who leant against the mantleshelf watching him with a frank contempt, to understand and sympathise.

"Of course--you're mad with me--you've got every right to be--it was a rotten thing to do--bolting like that--beastly ungrateful and inconsiderate. It was just because I couldn't explain. I knew you thought it was the fresh air and--and hunting down those poor jolly little beggars--and all the time it was just a girl and a blessed tune running through my head."

He began to hum, beating time with tipsy solemnity, and even then the wretched song brought something riotous and headlong into the subdued room.

The door seemed to have been flung violently open with an explosive gesture, as though some invisible showman had called out: "Look who's here!" and the woman herself had catherine-wheeled into their midst, standing there in her exotic gorgeousness, with her arms spread out in salutation and her mouth parted in that rather simple smile. Robert could almost smell the faint perfume that surrounded her like a cloud. It was ridiculous--yet for the moment she was so real, that he could have taken her by the shoulders and thrust her out.

"And you did want me to get better, didn't you?" Cosgrave pleaded wistfully, "even if it wasn't with your medicine. And in a sort of way it was your medicine, wasn't it? You made me go to see her."

Stonehouse had to sit down and pretend to rearrange his papers in order to hide how impatient he felt.

"My professional vanity isn't wounded, if that's what you're getting at. If you were better I'd be very glad. As far as I can see you're only drunk."

"I know--a little--I'm not accustomed to it--but it's not that, Robert. Really, it isn't. I'm jolly all--the time--even in the early morning. Seem to have come back to life from a beastly long way off--all at once--by special aeroplane. I don't think I've felt like this since--since----"

"Since Connie Edwards' day," Robert suggested. "But I expect you've forgotten her."

Cosgrave stared, round-eyed and open-mouthed and foolish.

"Connie----? No--I haven't. You bet I haven't. Often wonder what became of her. She was a jolly good sort."

"You didn't think so by the time she'd finished with you."

"I was an ass. A giddy, hysterical ass. I didn't understand. Poor old Connie! She could just swim for herself--but not for both of us. And I scared her stiff--tying myself round her neck like that."

Stonehouse cut him short.

"Nobody could accuse Mademoiselle Labelle of being a poor swimmer," he said. (He wondered at the same moment whether there was something wrong with him. He was so intently conscious of her. He could see her lounging idly in the big chair opposite, so damnably sure of herself and amused. He wanted to insult and, if possible, hurt her.)

"You're awfully down on people, Robert. Hard on 'em. Often wonder why you haven't chucked me off long ago. But that's an old story. You ought to like her for being able to swim well. It's what you do yourself."

"I don't mind her swimming well," Robert returned. "But I understand that she's been able to drown quite a number of people better able to look after themselves than you are. As far as you're concerned, it seems--rather a pity."

Cosgrave shook his head. A certain quiet obstinacy, not altogether that of intoxication, came into his flushed face. And yet he looked sorry and almost ashamed.

"I'm not going to drown. You know--I hate standing out against you, Robert. You've been so--so jolly decent to me--and I believe in you--more than in anything in the world. Always have done. If you said 'the earth's square,' I'd say, 'Why, yes, so it is--old chap!' But this--this is different--it's like a dog eating grass--a sort of instinct."

"Instinct!" Robert echoed ironically. "If you know where most instincts lead to----" He stopped, and then went on in a cold, matter-of-fact tone, as though he were diagnosing a disease. "It's not my business--but since you've come here I'd be interested to hear what you think is going to be the end of it all. I might persuade you to look facts in the face. By position you're a little suburban nobody, who was pushed out to West Africa to become a third-rate little trader. You've survived, and you've got a little money to burn. To you it seems a fortune. But it won't pay this woman's cigarette bills. She makes you ridiculous."

"I am ridiculous," Cosgrave interrupted patiently. "I always have been, you know. I expect I always shall be. I'm the square peg in the round hole--and that's always comic. But she doesn't laugh at me. She's just let me join in like a good sport. I know I'm out of place, too, among her smart pals--you needn't rub it in--but she doesn't seem to make any difference, I might be the smartest of the lot. I tell you, when I think of the good times I've had, I feel--I feel"--absurd and drunken tears came into his eyes--"as though I were in church--I'm so awfully grateful."

"Her smart pals pay pretty dearly for their good times. It will be time to be grateful when she's had enough of you." It escaped him against his will. He knew the futility of such taunts which seemed to betray an anger too senseless to be admitted. He did not care enough to be angry.

"You--you don't understand, old chap. Seems cheek--my saying that to you. But you're not like other people--you don't need the things they have to have to keep going. And, anyhow, she's not responsible for the asses men make of themselves." He was becoming more fuddled as the warmth of the room closed over his wine-heated brain. But his eyes had changed. They had narrowed to two twinkling slits of gay secretiveness. "More things in heaven and earth than you dream of, old chap. But you don't dream, do you? Never did. Got your teeth into facts--diseases--and getting on--and all that. What's a song and a dance to you? But I wish you liked her, all the same. P'raps you do, only you won't own up. She liked you, you know. Fact is, it was she sent me along to dig you out."

At that Stonehouse was caught up sharply out of his indifference. He flushed and thrust his hands into his pockets to prevent them from clenching themselves in absurd resentment.

"What do you mean?"

Cosgrave nodded. But he looked suddenly confused and rather sulky, like a play-tired child who has been shaken out of its sleep to be cross-examined.

"Well--some people would be jolly flattered. There's to be a big beano on her birthday--a supper party behind the scenes--and she said: 'You bring along your nice, sad, little friend--_ce pauvre jeune homme_.' You know, Stonehouse, it made me laugh, her describing you like that. I said: 'You don't need to be sorry for Robert Stonehouse. He can keep his own end up as well as anybody.' But she said: '_Ce pauvre jeune homme_.' I couldn't get her to see you were a damned lucky fellow." He dropped back into the corner of the chesterfield and yawned and stretched himself. "I want you to come too. Do you good. P'raps she's right. P'raps you've had a rotten time in your own way. Though I don't know--I'd be happy enough, if I were you--always seem to come out on top--not to care for any damn thing on earth, except that--not even Francey Wilmot--or even me--just a sort of pug-dog you trailed behind on the end of a string--a sort of mascot."

He was going to sleep. He waggled his arm feebly, groping for Stonehouse. "Say you'll come. I'd be awfully proud--show you off, you know. Always was--awfully proud--have such a pal."

He was the very figure of stupid intoxication as he lay there with his crumpled evening clothes and disordered hair--and yet not ugly either, but in some way innocent and simple. (Robert could see little Rufus Cosgrave, excited and tired out after the chase to the Greatest Show in Europe, peering through the disguise of rowdy manhood.)

Stonehouse threw a rug over him, resigning himself to the inevitable. But when he had switched off the main lights he gave an involuntary glance over the suddenly shadowed room as though to make sure that the darkness had exorcised an alien and detestable presence.

So she was sorry for him. That, at any rate, was amusing. Or perhaps she thought he was afraid of her in the obscure duel that was being fought out between them.

Cosgrave caught hold of him as he passed.

"The end of it all will be that I'll go back to my old swamp and tell the fellows that I've had a first-rate leave. I'll tell 'em about her, and they'll sit round open-mouthed--thinking I'm no end of a dog--and that they'll do the same next time they get a chance. They'll be awfully bucked to hear there's a good time going after all." He pleaded drowsily: "Say you'll come though, Robert. You're such a brick. I'm beastly fond of you, you know."

Robert Stonehouse withdrew his hand sharply from the hot, moist clasp. (How he had run that night! As though the devil had been after him instead of poor breathless little Cosgrave with his innocent confession.)

"Oh, I'll come," he said.

2

After all, nothing changed very much. Grown-up people masqueraded. They pretended to laugh at the young fools they had been and were still behind the elaborate disguise of adult reasonableness and worldly wisdom. For Robert Stonehouse, at any rate, it was ridiculously the old business over again--children whose games he despised and could not play, despising him.

It seemed that she had invited everyone and anyone whose name had come into her head, without regard for taste or sense, and the result, half raffish and half brilliant, somehow justified her. The notable and notorious men there, the bar-loungers whose life gave them a look of almost pathetic imbecility, the women of fashion and the too fashionable ladies of the chorus had, at least temporarily, accepted some common denominator. They rubbed shoulders in the stuffy, dingy, green-room with an air of complete good-fellowship.

Robert Stonehouse stood alone among them, for nothing in his life had prepared him to meet them. He had been accustomed to encounter and master significant hardship, not an apparently meaningless luxury and aimless pleasure. He knew how to deal with men and women whose sufferings put them in his power or with men of his own profession, but these people with their enigmatic laughter, their Masonic greetings, almost their own language (which was the more troubling since it seemed his very own), threw him from his security. They made him self-conscious and self-distrustful. They might be ten times more worthless than he believed them to be, and he might be ten times a bigger man than the Robert Stonehouse who had made such a good thing of his life. They had still the power to put him in the wrong and to make him an oaf and an outsider. And they knew it. He felt their glances slide over him furtively and a little mockingly. Yet outwardly he conformed to them. He wore his clothes well enough, and his self-control covered over his real distress with a rather repellent arrogance. He was even handsome, as a plain man can become handsome whose mind has dominated from the start over a fine body. And with this air of power went his flagrant youthfulness.

But the girl standing next him dropped him a flippant question with veiled irony and dislike in her stupid eyes, and turned away from him before he answered. She was a vulgar, garish little creature, and he could afford to smile satirically (and perhaps too consciously) at the powdered shoulder which she jerked up at him. And yet he was deeply, miserably shamed.

It was like a play in which he was the only one who did not know his part. Even Cosgrave played up--a little too triumphantly, showing off--as a tried man-of-the-world. And at her given moment the star performer made a dramatic entry into the midst of them, a cloak of pale blue brocade thrown over her scanty dress and her plumes still tossing from the elaborately tousled head.

They greeted her with hand-clapping and laughter, and she held out her thin arms, embracing them as old friends. In her attitude and in her eyes which passed rapidly from one to another, there was good-humoured understanding. She knew probably what the more immaculate among them thought of her, and that they were there to boast about it as English people boast of having visited Montmartre at midnight. It was daring and amusing to be at this woman's notorious dinners. They thought they patronized her, whatever else they knew. But in reality the joke was on her side.

"_Allons_--to ze feast, friends."

She had seen Robert Stonehouse, and she went straight to him, waving the rest aside like a flock of importunate pigeons, and took his arm. "You and I lead the way, _Monsieur le docteur_."

He did not answer. He was glad that she had signalled him out. It smoothed his raw pride. And yet he thought: "This is her way of making fun of me." And he hated her and the scented warmth of her slim body as it brushed lightly against his. He hated his own excited triumph. For the first time he became aware of something definitely abnormal in himself, as though a dead skin had been stripped off his senses and he had begun to see and hear with a primitive and stupefying clearness.

The rest followed them noisily along grimy, winding passages and between dusty wedges of improbable landscapes out on to the stage. A long table had been laid in the midst of the stereotyped drawing-room, which formed the scene of her grotesque dancing, and absurdly elaborate waiters in powdered hair and knee-breeches hovered in the wings. They were not real waiters, and from the moment they came out into the footlights the guests themselves became the chorus of a musical comedy. It was difficult to believe in the over-abundant flowers with which the table was strewn or in the champagne lying ostentatiously in wait.

The curtain had been left up, and the dim and dingy auditorium gaped dismally at them. The empty seats were threatening as a silent, starving mob pressed against the windows of a feasting-house. But the woman on Stonehouse's arm waved to them.

"I like it so. I see all my friends there--my old friends who are gone--God knows where. They sit and laugh and clap and nod to one another. They say: '_Voyons_, our Gyp still 'aving a good time.' And I kiss my 'and to them all."

She kissed her hand and threw her head back in the familiar movement as though she waited for their applause. And when it was over she looked up into Robert Stonehouse's face.

"_Monsieur le docteur_ is a leetle pale. One is always nervous at one's debut. You never act before, _hein_?"

"Not in a theatre like this," he said.

And he felt a momentary satisfaction because she knew that his answer had a meaning which she did not understand.

She persisted.

"Monsieur Cosgrave say you would not come. To say you never do nothing--only work and work. Is that true?"

"Yes."

"Don't dance--don't go to the theatre--don't love no one--don't get a leetle drunk sometimes? Never, never?"

"No," he said scornfully.

"Don't want to, _hein_?"

"I hate that sort of thing."

(But she was making him into a ridiculous prig. She turned the values of life topsy-turvy with that one ironic, good-natured gesture.)

"_Eh, bien_, it's a good thing for my sort there are not too many of your sort, my friend. But per'aps it is not quite so bad as it seems, for you 'are come after all."

"I had to," he thrust at her.

"'Ow you say--professionally?"

"Yes."

"But I 'ave not get ze tummy-ache--not yet."

"I don't care about you."

"You want to look after your leetle friend, _hein_?"

"Yes."

She was unruffled--even concerned to satisfy him.

"Well, then, you be policeman. You sit 'ere. It is always better to watch ze thief than ze _coffre-fort_. You keep an eye on me and see I don't run away with 'im. _Voyons, mesdames et messieurs_, our friend 'ere 'ave the place of honour. 'E sit next me and see I behave nice. 'E don't like me ver' much. 'E think me a bad woman."

They laughed with her and at him. He felt himself colour up and try to laugh back. (And it was oddly like his attempt to propitiate Form I when it had gibed him on that bitter pilgrimage from desk to desk.) He took his place at her right hand. He could see Cosgrave half-way down the table, and his thin, freckled face with its look of absurd happiness. He was unselfishly overjoyed that his friend should have been thus signalled out for honour. Perhaps he harboured some crazy certainty that after this Stonehouse would understand and even share his infatuation. He caught Robert's eye and smiled and nodded triumphantly.

"Now you see what she's really like, don't you?"

A string band, hidden in the orchestra under a roof of palms, played the first bars of her dance, and then stopped short and waited solemnly. She still stood, glass in hand.

"It is my birthday. God and I alone know which one. I drink to myself. I wish myself good luck. _Vive_ myself. _Vive_ Gyp Labelle and all who 'ave loved 'er and love 'er and shall love 'er!"

She drank her wine to the last drop, and the band began to play again, knitting the broken, noisy congratulations into a kind of triumphal chorus. It was very crude and theatrical and effective. It did not matter, any more than it matters in a well-acted play, that the whole incident had been rehearsed. It was as calculated and as spontaneous as that nightly, irresistible burst of laughter.

Rufus Cosgrave stood up shyly in his place. Had he been dressed a shade less perfectly and resisted the gardenia in his button-hole, he would have been better disguised. As it was, there could be no mistaking a little fellow from the suburbs who had got into bad company. And in spite of the West Africa swamp and its peculiar forms of despairing vice, he was so frightfully innocent that he did not know it,

"And--and we're here to--to wish you luck too--that you go on--as you are--dancing and laughing--making us all laugh and dance with you--however down in the dumps we are--for ever and ever--and to bring you offerings--for you to remember us by."

There must have been a great deal more to it than that. Stonehouse could see the notes clenched in one tense hand, but they had become indecipherable and he let them drop. He came from his place, stumbling over the back of somebody's chair, to where she stood, and laid a small square box done up in tissue paper at her side. She laughed and caught him by the ear, and kissed him on both flaming cheeks.

"A precedent--fair play for all!" the man opposite Stonehouse shouted.

They came then, one after another, treading on each other's heels, and she waited for them, an audacious figure of Pleasure receiving custom, and kissed them, shading her kiss subtly so that each one became a secret little joke out of the past or lying in wait in the future, at which the rest could guess as they chose. Some of the women whom she knew best joined in the stream. They bore her, for the most part, an odd affinity and no ill-will. They had set out on the same road and had failed, and their failure stared out of their crudely painted faces. But perhaps they were grateful to her for not having forgotten them--or for other more obscure reasons. They gave her what they could--extemporary gifts some of them--a tawdry ring or a flower which she stuck jauntily among the outrageous feathers. The significantly small parcels she did not open--either from idle good nature or from sheer indifference. Stonehouse wondered what Cosgrave's little box contained. Probably a year or two of the mosquito-infested swamp to which he would soon return to boast of this night's extravaganza.

"And you, _Monsieur le docteur_?"

For he had gone on eating and drinking with apparent tranquillity.

"Oh, I have nothing--nothing but admiration," he said smiling.

She shook her head.

"_Ca ne va pas_. The chief guest. Ah, no! That is not kind. A birthday--_c'est une chose bien serieuse, voyons_. Who knows? Per'aps you never 'ave another chance--and then you 'ave remorse--'orrible, terrible remorse. Or do you never 'ave remorse either, _Monsieur le docteur_?"

"No--not yet."

"You must not run ze risk, then."

He thought savagely.

"If I had a diamond stud she would make me give it her."

He took a shilling from his pocket and laid it gravely in the midst of her trophies.

"Is that enough?"

And then before he could draw back she had kissed him between the eyes.

"_Quite_, then. I keep it for a mascot, and you will remember to-morrow morning, when you are ver' grave and important with some poor frightened patient, that Gyp Labelle kiss you last night, and that you are not different from ze others, after all. And I will take my shilling from under my pillow, and say: 'Poor Gyp, that's what you're worth, my friend!'"

"He doesn't know you yet."

Robert Stonehouse looked up sharply. The interruption had started a new train of thought. Beyond the flushed face of the man opposite him, he could see the empty stalls, row after row of gaunt-ribbed and featureless spectators, watching him. The play had become a nightmare farce in which he had chosen a ludicrous, impossible part. But he had to go on now.

"Except for Cosgrave there, I've known Mademoiselle Labelle longer than any of you. I've known her ever since I was a boy."

He felt rather than saw their expressions change. She too stared with an arrested interest, but he looked away from her to Cosgrave, smiling ironically. If it humiliated her and made her ridiculous too--well, that was what he wanted. He wanted to pay her back--most of all for the excitement boiling in him--the sense of having been toppled out of his serenity into a torrent of noise and colour by that audacious touch of her lips upon his face. And there was Cosgrave--and then again some older score to be paid off--something far off and indistinct that would presently come clear.

"Don't you remember, Rufus?"

"Rather. But I know you a minute longer, Mademoiselle. I saw you before he did."

"That was because Mademoiselle Moretti rode first."

"Ah--the Circus!" She threw her head back, drawing a deep breath through her nostrils as though she savoured some long-lost perfume blown in upon her by a sudden wind. "Now I remember too. Ze good Moretti. She ride old Arabesque. 'E 'ave white spots all over 'im--on 'is chest and what you call 'is paws, and every evening she 'ave to paint 'im like she paint 'er face. Madame Moretti--that was a good sort--_bonne enfant_--what you say?--domestic--not really of ze Circus at all. She like to wash up and cook leetle _bonnes-bouches_ for supper. She was a German--Fredechen we call 'er--and she could make Sauerkraut--_eh bien_, I--_moi qui vous parle_--_une bonne Francaise_--I make myself sick with 'er Sauerkraut. Afterwards she grow too stout and marry ze _proprietaire_ of what you call it?--a public-'ouse--'Ze Crown and Garter' at some town where we stop a week. By now, I think she 'ave many children and a chin for each."

Cosgrave laughed noisily.

"Didn't I tell you, Robert? A barmaid!"

"Yes--you had better taste." But he was hot with anger. "And then you came at her heels, Mademoiselle. You rode--what was it--a donkey, a fat pony? I forget which. Perhaps I was thinking too much of Madame Moretti. But I remember you were dressed as a page and wore coloured tights that didn't fit very well, and that everybody laughed because of your thin long legs. And you threw kisses to us--even Cosgrave got one, didn't you, Cosgrave? And then I'm afraid I forgot you altogether. You see, there were camels and elephants and a legless Wonder and I don't know what, and it was my first circus."

"It must 'ave been a donkey," she said, narrowing her eyes. "I 'ave ridden so many donkeys."

He saw then that she did not mind at all the fact that she had once been a circus-clown. Rather he had tossed her a memory on which she feasted joyfully, almost greedily. She pushed her plate and glass away from her, and sat with her face between her hands.

"Well--I 'ave 'ad good times always--but per'aps they were ze best of all. Ah, ze good old Circus--ze jolly life--one big family--monkeys and bears and camels and elephants and we poor 'umans, all shapes and sizes, long legs and short legs and no legs--loving and quarrelling--good friends always--Monsieur George with 'is big whip and 'is silly soft 'eart--ze gay dinners after we 'ave 'ad full 'ouse and ze no dinners at all when things go bad--and then ze journeys from town to town--sometimes it rain all day and sometimes it is so hot and the dust rise up and smother us. But always when we come near ze town we brighten up, we pretend we are not tired at all. We make jokes and wonder what it will be like 'ere. Always new faces--new streets--new policemen--and always ze same too--ze long procession and ze torchlights and ze music and ze people running like leetle streams down ze side streets to join up and march along--ze leetle boys and girls with bright eyes--shouting and waving, so glad to see us."

It was not much that she said, and she did not say it to them. She disregarded them all, and yet by some magic, through the medium of the jerky, empty sentences she made them see the vulgar, gaudy thing as she was seeing it. The subdued music, the tinkling of plates and glasses, they themselves made a background for her swift picture. They watched it--the old third-rate circus--trail its cheap glitter and flare and bang out of darkness and across the stage and into darkness again--tawdry and sordid, and yet kindly and gay and gallant-hearted too.

Robert Stonehouse stared heavily in front of him. He had drunk--not much, but too much. He was not accustomed to drinking. The very austerity of his life betrayed him. These people too--these women--half-naked with their feverish, restless eyes--these men with their air of cynical and weary knowledge--were getting on his nerves. He wished he had not come. He wished he had not reminded her of that accursed circus, for it had involved remembering. He had called up a little old tune that would not be easily forgotten, that would go on grinding itself round and round inside his brain, and when he had chased it out would come back, popping out at him, bringing other small, pale ghosts to bear it company. He could see Cosgrave and himself--the little boys with bright eyes--and feel the reverberations of their astonishment, their incredulous delight. For a moment they had held fast to the tail-end of the jolly marching procession, and then it had been ripped out of their feeble hands. But the procession went on. It was always there, round the corner, with its music and fluttering lights, and if one was infirm of purpose like Cosgrave, or like a certain James Stonehouse, one ran to meet it, flung oneself into it, not counting the cost, lying and stealing.

He heard her voice again and pressed his hands to his hot eyes like a man struggling back out of a deep sleep.

"Where are they all now? _Dieu sait_. Monsieur Georges 'e die. As for me I go 'ome to ze old Folies Bergeres, and for six months I wait--a leetle ugly nobody with long thin legs dancing with ten other ugly leetle nobodies with all sorts of legs be'ind La Jolleta. You don't remember 'er, '_hein_! Ah, _c'est vieux jeu ca_ and you are all too young, _Mesdames et Messieurs_. She was ze passion of your grandpapas. God knows why. Why do you all love me, _hein_? _Une Mystere_. Well, she was ver' old then, but she 'ave ze good 'ealth and ze thick skin of ze rhinoceros. And some'ow no one 'ave ze 'eart to tell 'er. It become a sort of joke--'ow long she keep going--ze Boulevards make bets about it. But for me it is no joke. I am in a 'urry, _moi_, and I know I can do better than she did ever--I 'ave something--'ere--'ere--that she never 'ave. And so one night I put a leetle pinch of something that a good friend of mine give me in La Jolleta's champagne what she drink before she dance, and when ze call-boy come she lie there on ze sofa--'er mouth open--_comme ca_--snoring--like a pink elephant asleep--'ow you say--squiffy--dead to ze world. Ze manager 'e tear 'is 'air out, and then I come and show 'im and 'e let me go on instead because there is no one else. And the people boo and shriek at me, they are so angry and I make ze long nose at them all--and presently they laugh and laugh."

They could see her. It wouldn't have seemed even impudent. Even then she had been too sure of herself.

"And when I come off ze manager kiss me on both cheeks. _Et c'etait fait_."

They applauded joyously. Her brutal egotism was a good joke. They expected nothing else from her. She was like an animal whose cruelty and cunning one could observe without moral qualms.

"It was a mean thing to have done," Stonehouse said loudly and truculently--"a treacherous thing."

A shadow was on Cosgrave's face. He leant towards her, almost pleading.

"And La--La--what did you call her? La Jolleta--what became of her?"

She made a graphic gesture.

"She went into the sack, little one---into the sack. She was old. One should go gracefully."

"You too," Stonehouse said, in a savage undertone.

"I---- Oh, no, _jamais, jamais_." She lifted the monstrous crest of plumage from her head and set it in the midst of the flowers and rumpled up her hair till she was like the child riding the fat pony. "You see yourself--I never grow old, my friend."

"You are older already," he persisted.

But the man opposite broke in again. He leant towards Stonehouse, his inflamed eye through the staring monocle fixing him with an extraordinary tipsy earnestness.

"No, doctor, you are mis-mistaken. It would be intolerable--you understand--quite intolerable. There are things that--that must not be true--as there are other things that must be true. We've staked our last penny on it, sir, and we've got to win. Mademoiselle here knows all about it, and she'll play the game. A sport, doctor, a sport. Won't let old friends go bankrupt--no--certainly not."

They laughed at him. It seemed unlikely that he himself knew what he was talking about. But he shook his head and remained sunk in solemn meditation, twirling the stem of his glass between thick, unsteady fingers. The girl next him nudged him disgustedly.

"Oh, wake up! You'll be crying in a minute. Talk of something else."

"Tell us the story of the Duke and the Black Opal, Gyp."

She waved them off.

"No--no--that is not discreet. One must not tell tales. That might frighten someone 'ere who loves me."

And she looked at Stonehouse, a little malicious and insolently, childishly sure. He leant towards her, speaking in an undertone, trying to stare her down.

"Do you mean me, Mademoiselle?"

"And why not, _Monsieur le docteur_? Would it be so strange? You say you love nobody. But it seems you love ze poor fat Moretti--terribly, terribly, no doubt, so that you almost break your small 'eart for 'er. And per'aps someone else too. You say you don't drink--but you are just a leetle drunk already. You are not different from ze rest. I tell you that before--and I know. I am a connoisseur. It is written--'ere in the eyes and in the mouth. It is dangerous, the way you live. _Quant a moi_--I don't want you, my friend--we two--that would be an eruption--a disaster--I should be afraid."

She pretended to shudder, and a moment later seemed to forget him altogether. She pressed her cigarette out on her plate and went over to the piano, touching Cosgrave lightly on the shoulder as she passed him.

"Come, my latest best-beloved, we 'ave to amuse ze company. We sing our leetle song together."

But first she made a deep low bow to the shadowy theatre. She kissed her fingers to the empty boxes that stared down at her with hollow, mournful eyes. (Were there ghosts there too, Stonehouse wondered bitterly? The unlucky Frederick, perhaps, with the fatal hole gaping above the temple, applauding, leaning towards her!)

She sang worse than usual. She was hoarse, and what voice she had gave way altogether. It did not seem to matter either to her or to anyone else. What she could not sing she danced. There was a chorus and they joined in filling the gloom behind them with sullen, ironic echoes. She reduced them all, Stonehouse thought, to the cabaret from which she sprang.

And it was comic to see Cosgrave with his head thrown back, playing the common, noisy stuff as though inspired.

When it was over he swung round, gaping at them with drunken, confidential earnestness.

"You know, when I was a kid I used to see myself--on a stage like this--playing the Moonlight Sonata."

She rumpled up his thick hair so that it stood on end like Loga's names.

"You play my song ver' nice. And that is much better than playing ze Moonlight Sonata all wrong, my leetle friend."

3

It was a sort of invisible catastrophe.

No one else knew of it. In the day-time he himself did not believe in it--did not, at first, think of it at all. It had all the astonishing unreality of past pain. He went his way as usual, was arbitrary and cocksure with his patients, and looked forward to the evening when he could put them out of his mind altogether and give himself to his vital work. For the hospital had become a fact. It stood equipped and occupied, an unrecognized but actual witness to his tenacity. Other men would get the credit. The Committee who had appointed him consulting surgeon, not without references to his unusual youth and their own daring break with tradition--had no suspicion that even the fund which, in a fit of inexplicable far-seeingness they had allotted to research, had been created under his ceaseless pressure. And not even in his thoughts was he satirical at their expense. They had provided the money and done what he wanted and so served their purpose. Among his old colleagues he bore himself confidently but unobtrusively. He could afford to pay them an apparent deference. He was going farther than they were. His eyes were fixed on a future far beyond the centres of their jealousies and ambitions when he would be freed from the wasteful struggle with petty ailments and petty people, and the last pretence of being concerned with individual life. It was a time of respite and revision. He was young--in his profession extraordinarily young--and he was able to look back, as a mountaineer looks back from his first peep over the weary foothills, knowing that the bitter drudgery is past and that before him lies the true and splendid adventure.

That was in the day-time. But with the dusk, the discreet shutting of doors and the retreating steps of the last patient, a change came. It was like the subtle resistless withdrawal of a tide--a draining away of power. He could do nothing against it. He could only sit motionless, bowed over his papers, striving to keep a hold over the personality that was slipping from him. And then into the emptiness there flowed back slowly, painfully, a strange life--a stream choked and muddied at its source--breaking through.

It was a physical thing. Some sort of nervous reaction. With the dread of that former break-down overshadowing him he yielded deliberately. He would leave the house and walk--anywhere--but always where there were people--down Regent Street, sweeping like a broad river into a fiery, restless lake. There he let go altogether, and the crowds carried him. He eddied with them in the glittering backwaters of the theatres, and studied the pallid, jaded faces that drifted in and out of the lamp-light with the exaggerated attention of a mind on guard against itself. He hated it all. It emphasized and justified his aloofness from the mass of men. These people were sick and ugly--sicklier and uglier in their pleasure-seeking than in their stubborn struggle for survival, which had at least some elemental dignity. It was from their poisoned lives that women like Gyp Labelle sucked their strength. It was their childish perverted instincts that made her possible. They made the very thought of immorality a grisly joke. And yet their nearness, the touch of their ill-grown, ill-cared-for, or grossly over-nurtured bodies against his, the sound of their nasal strident voices brought him relief. He could not shake off their fascination for him. He was like a man hanging round the scene of some conquered, unforgotten vice.

It was one dismal November evening that, turning aimlessly into a Soho side-street, he came upon an old man who stood on a soap-box under a lamp and preached. He held a Bible to the light and read from it, and at intervals leant forward and beat the tattered book with his open hand.

"You hear that, men and women. This is the liar, the tyrant, the self-confessed devil whom you have worshipped from the beginning of your creation. You see for yourselves the sort of beast he is. There isn't a brute amongst us who would do the things he's done. He's made you fight and kill and torture each other for his sake. And all down the ages he has laughed at you--he is laughing now because, after all--he knows the truth--he knows what I tell you here night after night"--and Mr. Ricardo leant forward and pointed a long, dirty finger at the darkness--"that he doesn't exist--that he is a dream--a myth--a hope----"

Someone cheered--perhaps because the last words had a sound of eloquent conclusion--and Mr. Ricardo nodded and took breath. He was like a scarecrow image that had been stuck up by a freakish joker in a London street. The respectability that still clung to him made him the more ludicrous. His clothes were the ruined cast-offs of a middle-class tradesman, and over them he wore his old masters gown. It did not flutter out behind now, but lay dank and heavy along his sides like the wings of a shot bird.

Robert Stonehouse stood back against the shuttered windows of a shop and stared at him. The sea, rushing out in some monstrous tidal wave had left its floor littered with old wreckage, with dead, forgotten people who stirred and lifted themselves. A grotesque, private resurrection. . . .

The crowd around Mr. Ricardo listened in silence, not mocking him. There were wide-eyed, haunted-looking children, and men and women not quite sober who drifted out from the public-houses to gape heavily at this cheaper form of entertainment. Possibly they thought he was some missionary trying to induce them to sign the pledge. Some of them must have known that he was mad. But even they did not laugh at him. Into their own dark and formless thoughts there may have come the dim realization that they, too, were misshapen and outcast. The rain falling in long, slanting lines through the dingy lamplight seemed to merge them into a mournful kinship.

He spoke rapidly, and for the most part the long, involved sentences rolled themselves without meaning. But now and then something struggled clear--a familiar phrase--an ironical echo. Then Robert Stonehouse saw through the disfigurement to the man that had been--the poor maimed and shackled fighter gibing and leering at his fellow-prisoners.

"And now, my delightful and learned young friends----"

And yet he had stood up for little Robert Stonehouse in those days--had armed him, and opened doors, and made himself into a stepping-stone to the freedom he had never known. And had gone under. . . .

"That is all for tonight, men and women. I thank you for your support. You may rest assured that the fight will go on. The end is in sight, and if need be I shall lead the last attack in person."

Then he stepped down from his soap-box and swung it on to his shoulders by means of a cord, and went limping off in a strange and anxious haste.

Stonehouse pushed roughly through the dispersing, purposeless crowd and caught up with him as he was about to lose himself in a dark network of little squalid streets. He felt oddly young and diffident, for the schoolmaster is always the schoolmaster though he be mad and broken.

"Mr. Ricardo--don't you remember me?"

The old man stopped and blinked up uncertainly from under the sodden brim of his hat. His dirty claw-like hands clutched his coat together in an instinctive gesture of concealment. He seemed disturbed and even rather offended at the interruption.

"I--ah--I beg your pardon. No, I'm afraid not. It is--ah--not unnatural. You understand--I have too many supporters."

"Yes--yes--of course. But you knew me years ago when I was a boy. Don't you remember Robert Stonehouse?"

It was evident that the name fanned some faint memory which flickered up for a moment and then went out.

"You will excuse me. It is possible. I have heard the name. But I have long since ceased to concern myself with persons. In a great struggle such as this individuals are submerged."

He walked on again, slip-slopping in his shapeless boots through the slush, his head down to the rain.

"Christine," Robert said, "don't you remember Christine?"

(He himself had not thought of her for years, and now deliberately he had conjured her up.)

Mr. Ricardo hunched his shoulders. He peered round at Stonehouse, frowning suspiciously.

"You are very persistent, sir. Are you God?"

"No."

"It is better to be quite frank with one another. Not an emissary of God?"

"No."

He seemed only half satisfied.

"You will excuse my asking. I have to be very careful. There have been certain signs of late that the enemy is anxious to negotiate--to--ah--reach some compromise. No direct offer, you understand, but various feelers--hints--suggestions--terms of a most unscrupulous and subtle nature--traps into which a man less--ah--wary than myself might well fall. This Christine--yes--yes--I have to be on my guard."

"I have nothing to do with God," Robert said gently. "I'm a friend--on your side. I'd like to help. If I knew where you lived so that I could learn more about your work----"

But Mr. Ricardo shrank away from him.

"I don't like the sound of that. I dare say I do you an injustice, young man, but I can't afford to take risks. My headquarters are my secret."

"Well"--he tried to speak in a matter-of-fact and reasonable way--"at any rate, a general must have munition. I'd like to help financially. You can't refuse me that."

They were almost through the labyrinth of Soho and on the brink of Oxford Street. Mr. Ricardo stopped again with his hand spread out flat upon his breast in a gesture not without power and dignity.

"You think I am a failure, sir, because I go poorly dressed. You are mistaken. In the struggle that I am carrying on, outward and material things are of no account. I might have all the wealth and all the armies of the world, sir, and be further from victory than I am now. The fight is here, sir, in the spirit of man, and the weaker and poorer I become the nearer I am to the final effort. I am a fighter, sir, stripping himself--presently I shall throw off the last hindrance, and if the enemy will not show himself I shall seek him out--I shall force him to stand answer----" He broke off. The chain of white-hot coherency had snapped and left him peering about him vaguely, and a little anxiously, as though he were afraid someone had overheard him.

"It has been very difficult--there were circumstances--so many circumstances----" He sighed and finished on the toneless parrot-note of the street orator: "My next meeting will be at Marble Arch, 3 p.m., on Tuesday. Thank you for your attention, and good-night."

He lifted his hat and bowed to left and right as though to an assembled multitude. The lamp-light threw his shadow on to the grey, wet pavements, and with the soap-box perched on his shoulders it was the shadow of a huge hunchback. Then he shuffled off, and Stonehouse lost sight of him almost at once in the dripping, uncertain darkness.

He walked on mechanically, aimlessly. He was tired out and dejected beyond measure by this tragic encounter. It was not any immediate affection for the old man, who had been no more to him than a strange force driving him on for its own purposes; it was the others he had evoked--and, above all, the sense of common misfortune which no man can avert for ever. For the moment he lost faith in his own power to maintain himself against a patient and faceless Nemesis.

It was morbid--the old terrifying signs of breakdown--the pointing finger.

"Thus far and no further with your brain, Robert Stonehouse."

And then, suddenly, he found that he was in a familiar street, and, stopping short, as though from old custom, to look up. There was the finest house in Harley Street which they were to have decorated with their brass plates. If it had risen straight out of the ground at the behest of his fancy he could not have been more painfully disconcerted. He had never known before that he had avoided it. He knew it now, and the realization was like the opening of a door into a dark and unexplored chamber of his mind. He stood there shivering with cold, and wet, and weariness. Who lived there now, he wondered? The old back-numbers whom they were to have ousted so ruthlessly? Well, he could find out. Someone lived there, at any rate. He could see a light in one of the upper rooms. He crossed over and went up the steps cautiously, like a thief. All the brass plates but one had gone. That one shone brightly in the lamp-light, giving the door a one-eyed, impish look. He could read the letters distinctly, and yet he had to spell them over twice. It was as though she herself had suddenly opened the door and spoken to him.

"Frances Wilmot, M.D."

Then he turned and walked away. But at the next corner he stopped and looked up again at the lighted window. What freakish fancy had possessed her----? Perhaps she was there now. He could see her in the room that had been his enemy. And he had brief vision of himself standing there in the empty street as he had done when he had loved her so desperately, gazing up at that signal of warmth and comfort out of the depths of his own desolateness.

He said "Francey!" under his breath, ironically, as though he had uttered a child's "open-sesame!" to prove that there had never been any magic in the word. But the sound hurt him.

This time he did not look back.

Nor was there any reassurance to be found that night in the concrete justification of his life. He set himself down to work in vain. One ghost called up another. The room with its solemn, bloodless impedimenta became--not a monument to his success, but a Moloch, to whom everything had been sacrificed--the joy of life, its laughter, its colour--and Christine. And not only Christine. He had been sacrificed too.

But he saw Christine most clearly. She sat in the big arm-chair where his patients waited for his verdict. She wore the big, floppy, black hat that she had liked best, and the grey hair hung in the old untidy wisps about her face. The chair was much too big for her. Her little feet hardly touched the ground. Her hands in the darned gloves were folded gravely over the shabby bag. He could see her looking about dimly and hear the clear, small voice.

"How wonderful of you, Robert! How proud your dear father would have been!"

He fidgeted with the papers on his table, rearranging, re-sorting, desperately trying not to suffer. But he would have torn the whole place down in ruins to have remembered that he had given her one day of happiness.

Well, there had been that one day on Francey's hill--the picnic. She had liked that. The wood at the bottom, like a silent, deep, green pool--and Francey's arms about his shoulders, Francey's mouth on his, giving him kiss for kiss.

Ghosts everywhere--and no living soul who cared now whether he failed or won through, whether he suffered or was satisfied. Only Cosgrave perhaps--poor, unlucky little Cosgrave--always hunting for happiness--breaking himself against life--going to the dogs for the sake of a rotten woman.

He fell forward with his face hidden in his arms and lay there shaken by gusts of fever. They weakened gradually, and he fell asleep. And in his sleep his father drew himself up suddenly, showing his terrible white face, and clutched at little Robert Stonehouse, who skirted him and ran screaming down the dark stairs.

"You can't--you can't--you're dead. I'm grown up--I'm free--I'm not like you--you can't--you can't----"

But the next morning he was himself again, sure and cool-headed and cool-hearted. He did not believe that he had suffered or in the recurrence of that terror.

III

1

Probably she had expected him. It must have seemed to her, so Stonehouse reflected as he followed the shrivelled old woman down a passage dim and gorgeous with an expensive and impossible Orientalism, a natural sequel to his enmity. Men did not hate her--or they did so at their peril. Then she would be most dangerous. The luckless Frederick, so the story ran, had snubbed her at a charity bazaar, and had made fun of her dancing. And he had stolen and finally shot himself for her sake. Perhaps she thought there was a sort of inevitability in this programme.

He had to wonder at and even admire the mad splendour of the place. Her taste was as crude and flamboyant as herself, but it too had escaped vulgarity which at its worst is imitative of the best, a stupid second-handness, an aggressive insolent self-distrust. She was not ashamed of what she was. She was herself all through, and she trusted herself absolutely. She wanted colour and there was colour. She wanted Greek columns in a Chinese pagoda and they were there. The house was like a temple built by a crazy architect to a crazy god, and every stick and stone in it was a fanatic's offering.

The old woman jerked her head and stood aside. Her toil-worn face with the melancholy monkey eyes was inscrutable, but Stonehouse guessed at the swift analysis he was undergoing. In his iron temper he could afford to be amused.

"Mademoiselle is within."

The room was a huge square. To make it, two floors at least of the respectable Kensington house must have been sacrificed. The walls were decorated with Egyptian frescoes and Chinese embroideries, and silk divans which might have figured in a cinema producer's idea of a Turkish harem were set haphazard on the mosaic floor. In the centre a stone fountain of the modern-primitive school and banked with flowers splashed noisily. Somehow it offered Kensington the final insult. But she had wanted it, just as she had wanted the Greek columns. There was even a certain magnificence about the room's absurdity. It was so hopelessly wrong that it attained a kind of perfection.

She herself sat on the edge of the fountain and fed a gorgeous macaw who, from his gilded perch, received her offerings with a lofty friendliness. But as Stonehouse entered she sprang up and ran to him, feeling through his pockets like an excited child.

"The poison--the poison!" she demanded.

He had to laugh.

"I forgot it," he said.

"_C'est dommage_. You 'ave not taken it yourself by any chance?"

"No--I wouldn't do that at any rate."

"_C'est vrai_. I ask--you 'ave an air _un peu souffrant_. Well, never mind. It's droll though--I think about you just when you ring up--I 'ave a damn pain--not ze tummy-ache this time--and I say: '_Le pauvre jeune homme_, 'ere is a chance for 'im to pay me out for kissing 'im when 'e don't want to be kissed.' You remember--I say I send for you one day. But ze old pain--it 'as gone now. You--'ow do you say?--you conjure it away."

"Your pains don't interest me," he said. "For one thing I don't believe you ever had any. I suppose you think a pain is the best entertainment to offer a doctor. It's thoughtful of you, but I didn't come here to be amused."

"Then I wonder what you want of me," she remarked. She went back to her place on the fountain's edge, sitting amidst the flowers and crushing them under her hands. The pose appealed to him as expressively callous, and yet it was innocent too, the pose of a child or an animal who destroys without knowledge or ill-will.

"Do people usually want things from you?" he asked.

"Always--all ze time."

"And you give so much."

She eyed him seriously.

"I give what I 'ave to give."

"And take what you can get."

"Like you, _Monsieur le docteur_."

The absoluteness of his hatred made it possible for him to laugh with her.

"My fees are fairly reasonable at any rate. I've helped some people for nothing."

"Because you love them?"

"No."

"_C'est dommage aussi_. You should love someone. It is much 'ealthier. I love everyone. Per'aps I love too much. I make experiments. You make experiments--and sometimes leetle mistakes. _Comme nous autres_. 'Ze operation was a _grand succes_--but ze patient die.' I know. Some of mine die too."

"Prince Frederick, for instance?"

She lifted the long chain of pearls about her neck and considered them dispassionately.

"That _canard_! You think 'e give me these? _Ce pauvre_ Fredi! 'E couldn't 'ave given me a chain of pink coral. I could 'ave bought 'im and 'is funny little kingdom with my dress-money. 'E shoot 'imself. Well, that was 'is _affaire_. 'E 'ave no doubt explain 'imself to ze _bon Dieu_, who is particulaire about that sort of thing. As to ze old pearls--my agent 'e set that story going--_pour encourager les autres_."

"Cosgrave among them?" he suggested.

"Monsieur Cosgrave? We won't talk about 'im just now, if you please. 'E make me ver' cross. I 'ate to be cross. It is ver' difficult to 'ave a good time with English people. They are so damn thorough. When they want to go to ze devil they want to go ze whole way."

"Perhaps that's why I'm here," he said ironically.

"_Voyons--voyons, c'est ennuyeux_----" She broke off and gave a little husky, good-natured laugh. "I remember. You think me a bad woman. But I am not a bad woman at all. Ze leetle girls in ze chorus--they are sometimes bad because they want things they 'ave no right to 'ave. They are just leetle girls with nothing to give, and they want to live ze big life and they tumble into ze gutter. They are ze ginger-beer who pretend to be ze champagne. _Mais mot_--I am ze real champagne. I make things seem jolly that are not jolly at all--ze woman who sit next you at dinner--ze food--ze bills who wait for you at 'ome--life. If you take too much of me you 'ave ze 'eadache. _Enfin, ce n'est pas ma faute_. I 'ave so much to give. I 'ave so much life. One life--one country--one 'usband is not enough. But I am not bad. If there was any sense in things they would give me an order and a nice long title--_Grande Maitresse de la Vie_--_Princesse de Joie_." She lifted her eyebrows at him to see whether he appreciated the joke. "Ah well--no. I talk too much about myself. Tell me instead what you think of my leetle 'ome. _C'est joli, n'cest-ce-pas_?" She waved towards the Chinese embroideries and added, with a child's absolute content: "I like it."

"I suppose you do," he retorted. "It reminds me of a quaint old custom I read about somewhere. When our early ancestors were building a particularly important house they buried a few of the less important citizens alive under the foundations. It seemed to have a beneficial influence on the building process."

She offered him her cigarette-case. She seemed to be considering his remark carefully. Suddenly she laughed out with an unfeigned enjoyment.

"I see. My victims, _hein_? You can make leetle jokes too. But why so ver' serious? I'm not burying you, am I?"

"No. You couldn't. And you're not going to bury Cosgrave. Oh--I don't want to waste my time and yours making accusations or appealing to what doesn't exist. I only want to point out to your--your business instinct that Cosgrave isn't worth burying. He's poor and he's unlucky. He won't bring you luck or anything else. Much better to let him go."

"Let 'im go? But I want 'im to go! Yesterday I would not see 'im. I didn't want to see 'im."

"That was a good reason. It's all rather late in the day, though. Two months ago Cosgrave came to England with about 3000 pounds. I know, because he told me. And now that's gone. You know where."

"I make a guess, my friend."

"He bought you presents--outrageous for a man in his position."

"Someone 'ave to buy them," she explained good-humouredly. "I don't ask about positions. It's not polite."

"Now he's at the end of his tether. He's got to go back to his job. Last night he came to my rooms for the first time for weeks. He was--was almost mad. When he first came to England he was very ill. That does not concern you. But what may concern you is that he has become dangerous. He threatened to shoot you."

"Well, before 'e know me 'e threaten to shoot 'imself. Decidedly, 'e is getting better, that young man."

Her shameless, infectious laughter caught him by the throat. He wanted to laugh too, and then thrust her empty, laughing face down into the water of her comic fountain till she died. There were people who were better dead. He had said so and it was true, in spite of Francey Wilmot and her childish sentimentality. Suddenly the woman in the hospital and this riotous houri were definitely merged into one composite figure of a mindless greed and viciousness. He clenched his hands behind his back, hiding them.

"If you would only sit down we should talk so much 'appier," she said regretfully. "You seem so far off--so 'igh up. Please sit down."

"I don't want to."

"Because you're afraid we might get jolly together, _hein_? Well, you stand up there then, and tell me something. Tell me. You don't love nobody. You are a very big, 'ard young man, who 'ave made 'is way in ze world and know 'ow rotten everybody else is. You 'ave 'ad 'ard times and 'ard times is ver' bad for everyone, except per'aps Jesus Christ, for either they go under and are broken, un'appy people, or they come out on top, and then zey are 'arder than anyone else. Well, you are ze big, 'ard young man. But you run after this leetle Monsieur Rufus as though 'e was your baby brother. Well--'e is a nice leetle fellow--but 'e is just a leetle fellow--with a soft 'eart and a soft 'ead. Not your sort. And, you're not 'is sort. 'E's frightened of you. 'E want someone who pat 'is 'ead and let 'im cry on 'is shoulder. You can't 'elp 'im--and you fuss over 'im--you come 'ere and try to put 'is 'eart _affaires_ in order and it's no use at all. _C'est ridicule, enfin_."

He looked away from her, so that she should not see that this time she had struck home. She had knocked the weapon out of his hand, and for the moment, in his astonishment and pain, he could not even hate her. It was true. He couldn't help Cosgrave any more. His strength and ability were, as she said, of no use. That was what Cosgrave had meant when he had laughed about the adenoids. He had failed Cosgrave from the moment that Cosgrave had demanded love for himself and human tenderness. He had no tenderness to give. He was a hard young man. He said slowly, and with a curious humility:

"I used to back him up when he was a kid. He trusted me too--and it's got to be a sort of habit. I want him to be happy."

"Because you are so un'appy yourself?"

"I'm all right," he said stubbornly. And then he added, still not looking at her. "Please give him up--so--so that he won't break his heart over it. I'm not a rich man either, but I'll make it worth your while."

She sprang up with a gesture of amused exasperation.

"'Ow _stupide_ you are, my clever friend. You are like ze old father in ze _Dame aux Camellias_. You make me quite cross. This Rufus--I can't give 'im up. 'E don't belong to me. I never ask for 'im. 'E come into my dressing-room and I like 'im for 'is cheek and I give 'im a good time. Now he is _ennuyeux_. 'E want to marry me and make an honest woman of me." She patted Stonehouse on the shoulder with so droll a grimace that he bit his lip to avoid a gust of ribald, incredible laughter. It was as though by some trick she changed the whole aspect of things so that they became simply comic--scenes in a jolly, improper French farce. "And now I 'ope you see 'ow funny that is. And please take Monsieur Cosgrave away and keep 'im away. I don't ask no better."

His anger revived against her. And it was a thing apart from Cosgrave altogether--a bitter personal anger.

"It can't be done like that. You can't take drugs away from a drug-fiend at one swoop. Let him down gently--treat him as a friend until he has to go--get him to see reason."

"No," she said. "You don't understand. You 'ave not 'ad my experience. If I let 'im 'ang on 'e get much worse. If I push 'im off--poof!--an explosion! Then 'e find a nice leetle girl who is not like me at all and marry--ver' respectable--and 'ave 'eaps of babies. That is what 'e want. But it is not my _affaire_--and I won't be bothered. I tell you 'e is too _ennuyeux_----"

He lashed out at her.

"--and too poor. My God, you're no better than a woman of the streets."

She assented with a certain gravity.

"_C'est bien vrai, ca--bien vrai_. I was born in ze gutter--I crawl out of ze gutter by myself. I keep out of ze gutter--always. And I don't cry and wring my 'ands when people try to kick me back again. I kick them. I look after myself. Monsieur Cosgrave--and all those others--they must look after themselves too. Do you think they bother about me if I become _ennuyeuse_--like them--and cry because they don't love me and like some leetle girl in ze chorus better? Not they. They want fun and life from me--and I give them that. When they want more they can--'ow you say?--get out?"

He stared at her in white-hot detestation.

"I see. I've just wasted my time. You're--you're as infamous as they say. You're taking everything he has, and now he can go and hang himself. You're worse than a woman of the streets because you're more clever."

She kissed her fingers at him in good-humoured farewell. "I like you ver' much--_quand meme_," she said. "Next time I come and call on you, per'aps!"

2

That same night Cosgrave, frustrated at the theatre, tried to force an entrance to the Kensington house, and the old woman, seconded by a Japanese man-servant, flung him out again and into the arms of a policeman who promptly arrested him. Stonehouse went bail for him, and there was a strange, frantic scene in his own rooms.

For this was not the gentle young man who had met Connie Edwards' infidelity with an apathetic resignation. He was violent and indignant. His sense of outrage was a sort of intoxication which gave an extraordinary forcefulness to his whole bearing. He stormed and threatened--the misery that stared out of his haggard blue eyes shrivelling in the heat of an almost animal fury. (And yet he stammered too--which was comically what the other Rufus Cosgrave would have done.)

"I--I love her. I've never loved anyone else. That Connie business--a b-boy and girl affair--a silly flirtation--this--the real thing. I--I'm a m-man now. N-no one's going to play fast and loose with me. No, by God! I'll see her--she's got to have it out with me. I've a right to an explanation at least--and by God I'll have one!"

"For what?" Stonehouse asked.

"She loved me," Cosgrave retorted.

"I don't believe it."

"You d-don't believe it? W-what do you know about it? Didn't she behave as though she did? Didn't she go about with me? Didn't she take things from me--no decent woman would have taken unless she loved me?"

"She doesn't happen to be a decent woman," Stonehouse observed. "To do her justice she doesn't pretend to be one."

Cosgrave advanced upon him as though he would have struck him across the face. But he stopped in time, not from remorse, but as though pulled up by a revelation of maddening absurdity.

"Oh, you--you! You don't understand. You aren't capable of understanding. You're a block--a machine--you don't feel--you g-go about--rolling over p-people and things like--like a damned steam-roller. You're not a man at all. You don't love anyone--not even yourself. What do you know about anything?"

He was grotesque in his scorn, and yet Stonehouse, leaning with an apparent negligence against the mantel-shelf, felt himself go dead white under the attack. He had lost Cosgrave. And he knew now that he needed him desperately--more now than even in his desolate childhood--that unconsciously he had hugged the knowledge of that boyish affection and dependence to him with a secret pride as a talisman against he hardly knew what--utter isolation, a terrifying hardness. He made up his mind to have done now with reserve, to show before it was too late at least some of that dwarfed and suffocated feeling. But he faltered over his first sentence. He had trained himself too long and too carefully to speak with that cold, ironic inflexion. He sounded in his own ears formal--unconvincing.

"You're wrong. I do care. I care for you. You're my friend. I do understand, in part, at any rate. I can prove it. When I saw how unhappy you were I went to her--I tried to reason with her."

He broke off altogether under the amazed stare that greeted this statement. The next instant Cosgrave had tossed his hands to heaven, shouting with a ribald laughter:

"Oh, my Heaven--you poor fish! You think you can cure everything. I can imagine what you said: 'I suggest, Mademoiselle, that you reduce the doses gradually.'"

It was so nearly what he had said that Stonehouse flinched, and suddenly Cosgrave seemed to feel an impatient compassion for him. "Oh, I'm a beast. It was jolly decent of you. You meant well. But you can't help."

And _that_ was what she had said. Stonehouse made no answer. He saw himself as ridiculous and futile. He was sick with disgust at his own pain. If he had lost Cosgrave he wanted to have done with the whole business now--quickly and once and for all.

There was a sense of finality in the shabby room. The invisible bond that had held them through eight years of separation and silence had given way. It was almost a physical thing. It checked and damped down Cosgrave's excitement so that he said almost calmly:

"Well, I shan't attempt to see her again. You'll have that satisfaction. I'll get out of here--back to my jolly old swamp, where there aren't any beastly women--decent or indecent--only mosquitoes."

He waited a moment, as though trying hard to finish on a warmer, more generous note. Perhaps some faint flicker of recollection revived in him. But it could only illuminate a horrifying indifference. He went out without so much as a "good-night."

The morning papers gave the Kensington House incident due prominence. It was one more feather in Mademoiselle Labelle's outrageous head-gear. The Olympic had not so much as standing room for weeks after.

Cosgrave kept his word. He did not see her again, and within a week he had sailed for West Africa--to die. But ten days later Stonehouse received a wireless, and a month later a letter and a photograph of a fair-haired, tender-eyed, slightly bovine-looking girl in evening dress. It appeared that she was a Good Woman and the daughter of wealthy and doting parents, and that in all probability West Africa would see Rufus Cosgrave no more.

So that was the end of their boyhood. Cosgrave had saved himself--or something outside Stonehouse's strength and wisdom had saved him. They would meet again and appear to be old friends. But the chapter of their real friendship, with all its inarticulate romance and tenderness, was closed finally.

Stonehouse kept the photograph on the table of his consulting-room. He believed that it amused him.

3

Still he could not work at night. He resumed his haunted prowlings through the streets. But he took care that he did not pass Francey Wilmot's house again. He knew now that he was afraid. He was ill, too, with a secret, causeless malady that baffled him. There were nights when he suffered the unspeakable torture of a man who feels that the absolute control over all his faculties, which he has taken for granted, is slipping from him, and that his whole personality stands on the verge of disintegration as on the edge of a bottomless pit.

For some weeks he hunted for Mr. Ricardo in vain. He tried all the favoured spots which a considerate country sets aside for its detractors and its lunatics so that they may express themselves freely, without success. Mr. Ricardo seemed to have taken fright and vanished. But one afternoon, returning from the hospital, Stonehouse met him by accident, and followed him. He made no attempt to speak. He meant, this time, to find out where the old man lived, and, if possible, to come to his assistance, and his experience taught him the danger and futility of a direct approach. He followed therefore at a cautious distance that it was not always possible to maintain. Although it was early in the afternoon a dense but drifting fog wrapped the city in its dank folds, and the figure in front of him sometimes loomed up like a distorted shadow and then in a moment plunged into a yellow pocket of obscurity, and was lost. Then Stonehouse could only listen for his footfalls, quick and irregular, echoing with an uncanny loudness in the low vault of the fog.

Mr. Ricardo had evidently been speaking, for he carried the soap-box slung over his shoulder, and he was in a great hurry. It was extraordinary how fast the lame, half-starved old man could walk.

They crossed the park and over to Grosvenor Place. There was no doubt that Mr. Ricardo knew where he was going, but it flashed upon Stonehouse that he was not going home. There was something pressed and sternly in earnest about the way he hurried, as though he had some important appointment to keep and knew that he was already late. Once Stonehouse had to run to keep him within hearing.

They went the whole length of Victoria Street. Stonehouse had been physically tired out when he had started. Now he was not aware of being tired at all. A gradually rising excitement carried him on, unconscious of himself. He had no idea what he expected, but he knew definitely that something deeply significant was about to happen to them both, that they were running into some crisis.

Outside the Abbey the fog became impenetrable. The traffic had stopped, and the lights, patches of opaque rayless crimson, added to the confusion. There were people moving, however, faceless ghosts with loud footfalls, feeling their way hesitatingly, and among them Mr. Ricardo vanished. Almost at once Stonehouse lost his own bearings. In the complete paralysis of all sense of direction which only fog can produce, he crossed the wide street twice without knowing it. Then he came up suddenly under the spread statue of Boadicea and into little knots of people. A policeman was trying to move them on without success. They hung about hopefully like children who cannot be convinced that a show is really over.

"It's no good messing round here. You aren't helping anyone. Better be getting home."

Stonehouse knew what had happened. It was extraordinary how sure he was. It was almost as though he had known all along. But he said mechanically to one slouching shadow:

"What is it?"

A face, dripping and livid in the fog, like the face of a dead man, gaped at him.

"Some old fellow gone over--no, he didn't tumble, I tell yer. You cawn't tumble over a four-foot parapet. Chucked 'isself, and I don't blame 'im. One of them police-launches 'as gone out to fish 'im out. But they won't get 'im. Not now, anyway. Can't see two feet in front of yer, and the tide running out fast."

Stonehouse felt his way to the parapet and peered over. Above the water the fog was pitch-black and moving. It looked a solid mass. He could almost hear it slapping softly against the pillars of the bridge as it flowed seawards. By now Mr. Ricardo had travelled with it a long way. His death did not seem to Stonehouse tragic, but only inevitable and ironical. It was as though someone had played a grave and significant, not unkindly, joke at Mr. Ricardo's expense. Nor did Stonehouse feel remorse, for he knew that he could have done nothing. As Mr. Ricardo had said, it was not material things that had mattered. He had not killed himself because he was starving, but because the long struggle of his spirit with the enigma of life had reached its crisis. He had gone out to meet it with a superb gesture of defiance, which had also been the signal of surrender and acknowledgment.

The crowd had moved on at last. In the muffled silence and darkness Stonehouse's thoughts became shadowy and fantastic. Though he did not grieve he knew that a stone had shifted under the foundations of his mental security. Death took on a new aspect. It seemed unlikely that it was so simply the end.

He found himself wondering how far Mr. Ricardo had travelled on his journey, and whether he had met his enemy, and, face to face with him, had become reconciled.

IV

1

He did not know why he had consented to receive her, unless it was because he knew that they would meet inevitably sooner or later. He felt very able to meet her--cool, and hard and clear-thinking. It was early yet. A wintry sunlight rested on his neatly ordered table, and he could smile at the idea that in a few hours he would begin to be afraid again.

She had made no appointment. Urged by some caprice or other she had driven up to his door and sent up her card with the pencilled inscription "_Me voici_!" Standing at his window he could just see the long graceful lines of her Rolls-Royce, painted an amazing blue--pale blue was notoriously her colour--and the pale-blue clad figure of her chauffeur. It occurred to him that she had chosen the uniform simply to make the man ridiculous--to show that there were no limits to her audacity and power. She was, he thought, stronger than the men who thought they were ruling the destinies of nations. For she could ride rough-shod over convention and prejudice and human dignity. She was perhaps the last representative of an autocratic egotism in a world in which the individual will had almost ceased to exist. She seemed to him the survival of an eternal evil.

And yet when he saw her he laughed. She was so magnificently impossible. It seemed that she had put on every jewel that she could carry. She was painted more profusely than usual, and her dress was one of those fantastic creations with which producers endeavour to bluff through a peculiarly idiotic revue. But she carried it all without self-consciousness. It was as natural to her as gay plumage to a bird-of-paradise.

She gave him her hand to kiss, and then laughed and shook hands instead with an exaggerated manliness.

"I forget," she said. "It is a bad 'abit. You see. I keep my promise. I make ze return call. And 'ow kind of you to see me."

"It didn't occur to you that I might refuse," he told her.

"No, that's true. I never thought about it. You 'ave a leetle time for me, _hein_?"

"About ten minutes," he said.

He assumed a very professional attitude on the other side of his table. He wanted to nonplus and disconcert her, if such a thing were possible. Now that his first involuntary amusement was over he felt a return of the old malignant dislike. She had cost him Cosgrave's friendship, and he wanted to hurt her--to get underneath that armour of soulless good-humour. "I knew that you'd turn up one day or other," he said.

She looked at him with a rather wistful surprise.

"'Ow clever of you! You knew? Don't I look well, _hein_? I feel well--quite all right. But I say to myself: '_Voyons_--'alf an hour with nothing to do. I pay that cross doctor a visit.' I would 'ave come before, but I 'ave been so busy. We re'earse 'Mademoiselle Pantalonne,' ze first night to-morrow. You come? I send you a ticket."

"Thanks. That form of entertainment wouldn't entertain me--except pathologically. And if I went to the theatre I'd rather leave my profession outside."

"Path--pathologically," she echoed. "That sounds 'orrid--rather rude. You don't like me still, _hein_, doctor?"

"Does that surprise you?"

"It surprise me ver' much," she admitted frankly. She picked up the photograph on the table and examined it with an unconscious impertinence. "You like 'er?" she asked. "That sort of woman?"

"I don't know," he said. "I've never met her."

"She is not your wife?"

"She is Cosgrave's wife."

It was evident that although the episode had been concluded less than three months before she had already almost forgotten it.

"Cosgrave? _Ah oui, le cher petit Rufus_? There now--did I not tell you? Didn't I 'ave reason? Tell me--'ow many babies 'ave 'e got?"

"They were married last month," Stonehouse observed.

"_Ah--la la_! But 'ow glad I am! I can see she is the right sort for 'im. A nice leetle girl. But first 'e 'ave to 'ave a good time--just to give 'im confidence. Now 'e be a ver' good boy--a leetle dull per'aps, but ver' good and 'appy. I would write and tell 'im 'ow glad I am--but per'aps better not, _hein_?"

She winked, and there was an irresistible drollery in the grimace that made his lips twitch. And yet she was shameless--abominable.

"The ten minutes are almost up," he said, "and I suppose you came here to consult me."

He knew that she had not. She had come because he was a tantalizing object, because she could not credit his invincibility, which was a challenge to her. She laughed, shrugging her shoulders.

"You are an 'orrible fellow! You think of nothing but diseases and wickedness. I wonder if you 'ave ever 'ad a good time yourself--ever laughed, like I do, from ze 'eart?"

He looked away from her. He felt for a moment oddly uneasy and distressed.

"No, I don't suppose I have."

"Ah, _c'est dommage, mon pauvre jeune homme_. But you don't like me. What can I do?"

"I don't expect you to do anything."

"Not my business, _hein_? No one 'ave any business 'ere who 'ave not got an illness. Ver' well. I will 'ave an illness--a ver' leetle one. No, not ze tummy-ache. _C'est vieux jeu ca_. But a leetle sore throat. You know about throats, _hein_?"

"My specialty," he said smiling back at her with hard eyes.

"Bien, I 'ave a leetle sore throat--_fatigue plutot_--'e come and 'e go. I smoke too much. But I 'ave to smoke. It's no good what you say."

"I'm sure of that," he said.

He made her sit down in the white iron chair behind the screen and, adjusting his speculum, switched on the light. He was bitterly angry because she had forced this farce upon him. He felt that she was laughing all over. The pretty pinkness of her open mouth nauseated him. He thought of all the men who had kissed her, and had been ruined by her as though by the touch of a deadly plague. He pressed her tongue down with a deliberate roughness.

"You 'urt," she muttered. But her eyes were still amused.

"A great many people get hurt here," he said contemptuously, "and don't whine about it."

2

Ten minutes later they sat opposite each other by his table. She was coughing and laughing and wiping her eyes.

"_C'est abominable_," she gasped, "_abominable_!"

He waited. He could afford to wait. He had the feeling of being carried on the breast of a deep, quiet sea. He could take his time. Her laughter and damnable light-heartedness no longer fretted and exasperated him. Rather it was a kind of bitter spice--a tense screwing up of his exquisite sense of calm power. She was like a tigress sprawling in the sunshine, not knowing that its heart is already covered by a rifle. He prolonged the moment deliberately, savouring it. In that deliberation the woman in the hospital, Francey Wilmot, Cosgrave, and a host of faceless men who had gone under this woman's chariot wheels played their devious, sinister parts. They goaded him on and justified him. He became in his own eyes the figure of the Law, pronouncing sentence, weightily, without heat or passion or pity.

"You do it on purpose," she said, "you make me cough."

He arranged his papers with precise hands.

"I'm sorry--I know you came here as a joke. It isn't--not for you. It's serious." He saw her smile, and though he went on speaking in the same quiet, methodical tone, he felt that he had suddenly lost control of himself. "Medical science isn't an exact science. Doctors are never sure of anything until it has happened. But speaking with that reservation I have to tell you that your case is hopeless--that you have three--at the most four months----"

She had interrupted with a laugh, but the laugh itself had broken in half. She had read his face. After a long interval she asked a question--one word--almost inaudibly--and he nodded.

"If you had come earlier one might have operated," he said. "But even so, it would have been doubtful."

Already many men and women had received their final sentence here in this room, and each had met it in his own way. The women were the quietest. Perhaps their lives had taught them to endure the hideous indignity of a well-ordered death-bed without that galling sense of physical humiliation which tormented men. For the most part they became immersed in practical issues--how the news was to be broken to others, who would look after the house and the children, and how the last scene might be acted with the least possible inconvenience and distress for those who would have to witness it. Some men had raved and stormed and pleaded, as though he had been a judge whose judgment might be revoked: "Not me--others--not me--not to-day--years hence." They had paced his private room for hours, trying to get a hold over themselves, devastated with shame and horror at the breakdown of their confident personalities. Some had risen to an impregnable dignity, finer than their lives. One or two had laughed.

And this woman?

He looked up at last. He thought with a thrill that was not of pity, of a bird hit in full flight and mortally hurt, panting out its life in the heather, its gay plumage limp and dishevelled. The jewels and outrageous dress had become a jest that had turned against her. A shadow of the empty, good-humoured smile still lingered on a painted mouth palsied with fear. She was swaying slightly, rhythmically, backwards and forwards, and rubbing the palms of her hands on the carved arms of her chair, and he could hear her breath, short and broken like the shallow breathing of a sick animal. And yet he became aware that she was thinking--thinking very rapidly--calling up unexpected reserves.

"_Trois--mois--trois mois_. Well, but I don't feel so ill--I don't feel ill at all--per'aps for a leetle month--just a leetle month."

He had no clue to her thought. She looked about her rather vaguely as though everything had suddenly become unreal. There were tears on her cheeks, but they were the tears of her recent laughter. She rubbed them off on the back of her hand with the unconscious gesture of a street child.

"I suffer much?"

"I'm afraid so. Though, of course, anyone who attends on you will do his best."

"Death so ugly--so sad."

"Not always," he said.

It was true. She had been a beast of prey all her life. Now it was her turn to be overtaken and torn down. Only sentimentalists like Francey Wilmot could see in her a cause for pity or regret.

They sat opposite each other through a long silence. He gave her time. He showed her consideration. He thought of the pale-blue chauffeur waiting in the biting cold of a winter's afternoon. Well, he would be alive after she had become a loathsome fragment of corruption. He was revenged--they were all revenged on her now.

She fumbled with her gold and jewelled bag.

"What do I owe, _Monsieur le docteur_?"

"Three guineas."

She put the money on the table.

"That is ver' little for so much. I think--when I can't go on any more--I come to your 'ospital. You take me in, _hein_? I 'ave a fancy."

He made an unwilling movement. It revolted him--this obtuseness that would not see that he hated her.

"I can't prevent your coming if you want to. You would be more in your element in your own home. Even in their private rooms they don't allow the kind of things you're accustomed to. There are regulations. Your friends won't like them."

She looked up at him with a startled intentness.

"_Mes pauvres amis_--I 'ave so many. They won't understand. They say: 'That's one of Gyp's leetle jokes.' They won't believe it--they won't dare."

She gave him her hand, and he touched it perfunctorily.

"It's as you like, of course. You have only to let me know."

"You are ver' kind."

He showed her to the door, and rang the bell for the servant. From his vantage point he saw the pale-blue chauffeur hold open the door of the pale-blue limousine. A few loiterers gaped. By an ironical chance a barrel-organ in the next street began to grind out the riotous, familiar gallop. It sounded far-off like a jeering echo:

"I'm Gyp Labelle; If you dance with me You dance to my tune. . ."

A danse macabre. He wondered if she had brains or heart enough to appreciate the full bitterness of that chance. He could see her, in his mind's eye, cowering back among the pale-blue cushions.

The next morning he received a note from her and a ticket for the first night of "Mademoiselle Pantalonne"--"with her regards and thanks."

3

He went. In the morning he had tossed the ticket aside, scornful and outraged by such a poor gesture of bravado. But the night brought the old restlessness. He was driven by curiosity that he believed was professional and impersonal. It was natural enough that he should want to see how a woman of her stuff acted under sentence of death. But once in the theatre h e became aware of a black and solitary pride because he alone of all these people could taste the full flavour of her performance. He had become omniscient. He saw behind the scenes. Whilst the orchestra played its jaunty overture he watched her. He saw her stare into her glass and dab on the paint, thicker and thicker, knowing now why she needed so much more, shrinking from the skull that was beginning to peer through the thin mask of flesh and blood. He foresaw the moment, probably before the footlights, when the naked horror of it all would leap out on her and tear her down. Even in that she would no doubt seek the consolation of notoriety. It would be in all the papers. If she had the nerve to carry on people would crowd to see her, as in the Roman days they had crowded to the circus (gloating and stroking themselves secretly, thinking: "It is not I who am dying"). Or she would seek dramatic refuge in her absurd palace and surround herself with tragic glamour, making use of her own death as she had used the death of that infatuated and unhappy prince.

And yet he was sick at heart. In flashes he saw his own attitude as something hideous and abnormal. Then again he justified it, as he had always justified it. He found himself arguing the whole matter out with Francey Wilmot--a cool and reasoned exposition such as he had been incapable of at the crisis of their relationship. ("This woman is a malignant growth. Nature destroys her. Do you pretend to feel regret or pity?") But though he imagined the whole scene--saw himself as authoritative and convincing--he could not re-create Francey Wilmot. She remained herself. Her eyes, fixed on him with that remembered look of candid and questioning tenderness, blazed up into an anger as unexpectedly fierce and uncompromising. And he was not so strong. He had overworked all his life. Starved too often. The ground slipped from under his feet.

It was a poor, vulgar show--a pantomime jerry-built to accommodate her particular talent. She walked through it--the dumb but irresistible model of a French atelier, who made fools of all her lovers, cheated them, sucked them dry and tossed them off with a merry cynicism. When the mood took her she danced and her victims danced behind her, a grotesque ballet, laughing and clapping their hands, as though their cruel sufferings were, after all, a good joke. Neither they nor the audience seemed to be aware that she could not dance at all, and that she was not even beautiful.

It was an old stunt, disguised with an insolent carelessness. The producers had surely grinned to themselves over it. "We know what the public likes. Rubbish, and the older the better. Give it 'em." She even made her familiar entry between the curtains at the back of the stage, standing in the favourite attitude of simple, triumphant expectation, and smiling with that rather foolish friendliness that until now had never shaken her audiences from their frigidity. To them she had always been a spectacle, a strange vital thing with a lurid past and a dubious future, shocking and stimulating. They would never have admitted that they liked her. But tonight they gave her a sort of ashamed welcome. Perhaps it was the dress she wore--the exaggerated peg-top trousers and bonnet of a conventional Quartier Latin which made her look frank and boyish. Perhaps it was something more subtle. Stonehouse himself felt it. But then, he knew. He saw her as God saw her. If there was a God He certainly had His amusing moments.

But he found himself clapping her with the rest, and that made him angry and afraid. It seemed that he could not control his actions any more than his thoughts. The whole business had got an unnatural hold over him. He half got up to go, and then realized that he was trying to escape.

It was jolly music too. That at any rate her producers had toiled at with some zeal. Incredibly stupid and artless and jolly. Anyone could have danced to it. And she was a gutter-urchin, flinging herself about in the sheer joy of life (with death capering at her heels). He watched her, leaning forward, waiting for some sign, the faltering gesture, a twitching grimace of realization. Or was it possible that she was too empty-hearted to feel even her own tragedy, too shallow to suffer, too stupid to foresee? At least he knew with certainty that in that heated, exhausted atmosphere pain had set in.

He became aware that the sweat of it was on his own face--that he himself was labouring under an intolerable physical burden. He knew too much. (If God had His amusing moments he had also to suffer, unless, as Mr. Ricardo had judged, he was a devil.) She was facing what every man and woman in that theatre would have to face sooner or later. How? She at any rate danced as though there were nothing in the world but life. With each act her gestures, her very dress became the clearer expression of an insatiable, uncurbed lust of living. At the end, the orchestra, as though it could not help itself, broke into the old doggerel tune that had helped to make her famous:

"I'm Gyp Labelle."

She waltzed and somersaulted round the stage, and as the curtain fell she stood before the footlights, panting, her thin arms raised triumphantly. He could see the tortured pulse leaping in her throat. He thought he read her lips as they moved in a voiceless exclamation:

"_Quand meme--quand meme_."

The audience melted away indifferently. They, at any rate, did not know what they had seen.

And the next day he had another little note from her, written in a great sprawling hand. She had made all her arrangements, and she thought she had better reserve rooms in his hospital in about six weeks' time for about a month. After that, no doubt, she would require less accommodation.

A silly, fatuous effort, in execrable taste.

V

1

Robert Stonehouse took a second leave that he could not afford and went back to the grey cottage on the moors, and tramped the hills in haunted solitude. The spring ran beside him, a crude, bitter, young spring, gazing into the future with an earnest, passionate face, full of arrogance and hope, and self-distrust. His own frustrated youth rose in him like a painful sap. He was much younger than the Robert Stonehouse who, proud in his mature strength, had dragged an exhausted, secretively smiling Cosgrave on his relentless pursuit--young and insecure, with odd nameless rushes of emotion and desire and grief that had had no part in his ordered life.

The hills had changed too. They had been the background to his exploits. They had become brooding, mysterious partners whose purpose with him he had not fathomed. The things that ran across his path, the quaint furry hares and scurrying pheasants had ceased to be objects on which he could vent his strength and cunning. They were live things, deeply, secretly related to him and to a dying, very infamous woman, and his levelled gun sank time after time under the pressure of an inexplicable pity. He had stood resolutely aloof from life, and now it was dragging him down into its warmth with invisible, resistless hands. Its values, which he had learnt to judge coldly and dispassionately, weighing one against another, were shifting like sand. He seemed to stand, naked and alone, in a changing, terrifying world.

In those days the papers in their frivolous columns, were full of Gyp Labelle. Her press-agent was working frenziedly. It seemed that she had quarrelled with her manager, torn her contract into shreds, and slapped his face. There were gay doings nightly at the Kensington house--orgies. One paper hinted at a certain South African millionaire.

A last fling--the reckless gesture of a worthless panic-stricken soul, without dignity.

Or perhaps she had found that his diagnosis had been a mistake. Or she would not believe the truth. Or she was drugging herself into forgetfulness. Perhaps she might even have the courage to make an end before the time came when forgetfulness would be impossible.

He returned to town, drawn by an obsession of uncertainty. He found that she had arrived at her rooms in the hospital with the shrivelled old woman and the macaw and a gramophone.

She had signed the register as Marie Dubois.

"It is my real name," she explained, "but you couldn't have a good time with a name like that--_voyons_! Only one 'usband and 'eaps of babies."

She was much nearer the end than he had supposed possible. The last month had to be paid for. She lay very still under the gorgeous quilt which she had brought with her, and her hand, which she had stretched out to him in friendly welcome, was like the claw of a bird. "Everyone 'ere promise not to tell," she said. "I'm just Marie Dubois. Even ze undertaker--'e must not know. You put on ze stone: 'Marie Dubois, ze beloved daughter of Georges and Marianne Dubois, rag-pickers of Paris.' That will be a last leetle joke, hein?"

"It's as you wish," he said coldly.

He forced back the natural questions that came to him. He had a disordered conviction that he was fighting her for his sanity, for the very ground on which he had built his life, and that he dared not yield by so much as a kindly word. He did what lay in his power for her with a heart shut and barred.

She brought a little of her world and her whole outlook with her. On the last day that she was able to be up she dressed herself in a gay mandarin's coat with a Chinese woman's trousers, and tried to do her dance for the benefit of a shocked and fascinated matron. Every morning she wore a new cap to set off the deepening shadow of dissolution.

By the open fire the old woman embroidered ceaselessly.

"She is making--'ow you call it?--my shroud. You see--with ze blue ribbons. Blue--that's my colour--my lucky colour. As soon as I could speak I ask for blue ribbons in my pinafore."

"I should have thought your mind might be better occupied now," he retorted with brutal commonplaceness.

She winked at him.

"Oh, but I 'ave 'ad my leetle talk with _Monsieur le Cure_. 'E and I are ze best of friends, though I never met 'im before. 'E understand about ze blue ribbons. But Monsieur Robert is too clever."

"It seems so," he said scornfully.

She questioned him from out of the thickening cloud of morphia. "You don't believe in God?" And then as he shook his head she smiled sleepily. "Well, it is still possible 'e exist, _Monsieur_--_Monsieur le docteur_."

She lay quiet so that he thought she had fallen asleep, but the next moment her eyes had opened, widening on him with a startling wakefulness. It was as though her whole personality had leapt to arms, and bursting through the narcotic, stood free with a gay and laughing gesture. "As to God--I don't know about 'im, but I exist--I go on. You bet your 'at on that, my friend. I don't know where I go--but I go somewhere. And I dance. And if St. Peter sit at ze golden gates, like they say in ze fairybook, I say to 'im: ''Ave you ever seen ze Gyp Galop?' And then I dance for 'im and ze angels play for me"--she nodded wickedly--"not 'ymn tunes."

She was serious. She meant it. If she survived she survived as what she was or not at all. And looking down on her wasted, tortured body, Stonehouse had a momentary but extraordinarily vivid conviction that what she had said was true. She would persist. Whatever else happened, Gyp Labelle would go on having a good time. She could not be extinguished. There was in her some virtue altogether apart from the body--a blazing vitality, an unquenchable, burning spirit.

He felt his hatred of her wither before it.

"And 'e say: 'You dance ver' bad, Gyp, but you make me laugh. You go on and dance to ze others.' For 'e know who I am. My poor parents they make ze mistake. They think: ''Ere is such a ver' nice, good little _bebe_, and so they call me after my _Maman_, who is ver' nice and good too, and who love me ver' much--Marie--Marie Dubois."

She turned her head towards the old woman bending lower and lower over her fine work, and, smiling at her, fell asleep.

He returned, one night, to the hospital in the hope of being able to work in the laboratory, and instead, coming to her room, he went in. The action was so unpremeditated and unmotivated that he had closed the door before he knew what he had done. But the excuse he framed in his confusion was never uttered, for he had the right to appear dumbfounded. She sat, propped up like a painted wraith against a pile of gorgeous cushions, and all about her was scattered a barbarous loot of rings and bracelets, of strings of pearls, of unset stones, diamonds and emeralds, heaped carelessly on the table at her side, and twinkling like little malevolent eyes out of the creases of her coverlet.

The old woman wrote toilingly on a slip of paper. "Sh! This is ver' solemn. I could not sleep, and so I make my testament." She put her finger to her lips as though her whisper were only a part of a playful mystery and beckoned him, and he went towards her, reluctant, yet unresisting like a man hypnotized. He had a childish longing to touch all that colour, to take up great handfuls of it and feel its warmth and let it drip through his fingers. The death that stared out of her painted face, the silence and grim austerity of her surroundings made that display of magnificence a fantastic parable. The stones were the life that was going from her. She picked up each one in turn and caressed it, and held it to the light, remembering who knew what escapade, what splendid, reckless days, what tragedy. And yet there was no regret and surely no remorse in her farewell of them.

"_Ma Vieille_--she make a list of all. They will be sold--for ze children of Paris--ze _gamins_--as I was--for a good time." She held out her hand: "_C'est joli, n'est ce pas_?"

He looked unwillingly. It was a black opal, and as she moved it it seemed to come to life, and a distant resentful fire gleamed out of its sullen depths.

"Yes. But you oughtn't to have all--all this stuff about. No one could be held responsible----"

"What does it matter? If someone take it--someone 'ave it. It won't worry me. 'Ere, I tell you something--a story, _hein_, to amuse you? You remember our leetle dinner and 'ow I would not tell about ze Grand Duke and ze black opal? Well, I tell you now. It don't matter any more."

"No. You're doing yourself harm. You ought to sleep."

"I don't want to--I can't. It is 'orrible to lie awake in ze dark and---- And you, too, Monsieur Robert, you don't feel you sleep much to-night, _hein_?"

"No."

"_Alors_--'ere we are--two poor fellows shipwrecked--we make a leetle feast together--a feast of good stories. You say you don't like me ver' much. But that is _ridicule_ now. One only 'ates when one is afraid, and you aren't afraid any more of poor Gyp."

"Was I ever?" he demanded.

"A leetle--per'aps? You think to yourself: 'If I love 'er----!' Bah, that is all finished. Come, I tell you my funny story."

He had laughed. He was incredulous of himself. He sat on the edge of her bed listening to her whisper, a tortured whisper which she made supremely funny--a mock-conspirator's whisper which drew them close to one another in an outrageous intimacy.

"At any rate you had made a good enemy that time," he said.

She panted.

"Ah no--no. 'E 'ave a fine sense of humour, Monsieur ze Grand Duke. 'E laugh too. 'E say--'Gyp--you are ze ver' devil 'erself!' 'Ere, but this ruby--I don't care much for rubies--but this one 'ave a real fine story."

And so one by one the stones were taken up and held a moment, some to be discarded with a name or a forgetful shrug, and some to linger a while longer whilst she recalled their little ribald histories. And it seemed to Robert Stonehouse that gradually the room filled with invisible personages who, as the jewels dropped from her waxen fingers into the gaping box, bowed to her and took their leave. And at last they were all gone but one. He seemed to hear them, their footsteps receding faintly along the corridors.

She held an unset pearl in her hand.

"This one 'ave a ver' nice leetle story. A brigand give it me when 'e 'old up ze train between Mexico City and ze coast. A fine fellow--with a sombrero and a manner!" (She looked past Stonehouse, smiling, as though she too saw the shadow twirling its black moustache and staring back at her with gallant admiration.) "And brave too, _nombre de Dios_! And 'e bow and say: 'One does not take ransom from Mademoiselle Labelle. One pays tribute.' And 'e give me this to remember 'im by--as I give it you, Monsieur Robert."

He stood up sharply.

"No--I--I don't care for that kind of thing."

"For your wife, then!"

"I am not married."

"But one day per'aps? You love someone, _hein_?" (Had she wilfully forgotten? She studied his face with a wicked curiosity. He could not answer her.) "Give it 'er then--Monsieur Robert--_pour me faire plaisir_."

"There is no one to give it to."

"But there was----"

He tried desperately to regain the old sarcastic inflection.

"No doubt it seems inevitable to you."

"Tell me about 'er. _Voyons_, if you can't keep me alive, _Monsieur mon docteur_, you might at least amuse me."

"There is nothing to tell. I will give you something that will make you sleep."

"I do not want to sleep. That is bad, ugly sleep that you give me. So you quarrel. What you quarrel about, Monsieur Robert? Another woman?"

The sheer, grotesque truth of it drove him to an ironical assent.

"As you say, another woman----"

"_Oh, la la_! So there was once upon a time a ver' serious young man who forget to be quite serious. _Voyons_--you 'ave to tell me all now--just as I tell you."

He turned on her then. In five brief, savage sentences he had told her of Frances and the woman in the hospital. And when he had done he read her face with its tolerant good-humour, and the full enormity of it all burst over him like a flood of crude light. He turned away from her stammering:

"I've no business here--I've no business to be your doctor--or anyone's doctor. I think I must be going mad."

She shook her head.

"No--no--only too serious, _mon pauvre jeune homme_. But I like your--your Francey. I think she and I be good friends some'ow. She would see things 'ow I see them."

(He thought crazily:

"Yes, she would sit by you and look over your shoulder at your rotten life, and say: 'So that's the way it seems to you? And you're right. It's been a splendid joke.'")

"One of these days you be friends again too. And then you give 'er my leetle pearl. Say it's from Gyp, who is sorry she made so much trouble. Why not? You think it make her sad? It is not for that I give it you. It is to give you pleasure too."

He was labouring under an almost physical distress. She was poking fun at him, at herself, at death. She was making him a partner of thieves and loose women. And yet:

"It must not make you sad at all. When you see it you laugh--just as you laugh when I dance because I dance so ver' bad. Look 'ere, I 'ave something that you give me too." She dived back into the box and brought out a shilling lying side by side with the pearl in the palm of her open hand. "You tell 'er--that was all poor Gyp was worth to you, Monsieur Robert."

He had taken it. She tried to laugh out loud, triumphantly, the famous laugh. And then grey agony had her by the throat. She turned her face from him to the wall.

He felt that the old woman had risen. She was moving towards them. He said quietly:

"At least I can relieve you."

She made a passionate, absolute gesture of refusal. An astonished nurse had entered. He gave brief instructions. He said good-night, not looking at the limp, quiet figure on the bed, and went out.

He knew that he had seemed competent, unhurried and unmoved as befitted a man to whom death was the most salient feature of life.

But he knew also that he had fled from her.

In the crowd that went with him that night were Francey Wilmot and Connie Edwards and Cosgrave and all the people who had made up his youth. There were little old women who were Christines, and even James Stonehouse was there, tragically and hopefully in search of something that he had never found. Any moment he might turn his face towards his son, and it would not be hideous, only perplexed and pitiful.

It was as though an ugly, monstrous mass had been smashed to fragments whose facets shone with extraordinary, undreamed-of colours.

Not only the bodies of the people drifted with him, but their lives touched his on every side. It became a sort of secret pressure. They were neither great nor beautiful. They were identical with the people he had always seen on the streets and in the hospitals, sickly or grossly commonplace, but he could no longer judge them as from a great distance. He was down in the thick of them. They concerned him--or he had no other concern. He was part of their strangely wandering procession. He looked into their separate faces and thought: "This man says 'I' to himself. And one day he will say: 'I am dying' (as Marie Dubois said it)." And he recognized for the first time something common to them all that was not commonplace--an heroic quality. At least that stark fact remained that at their birth sentence of death had been passed upon them all. Before each one of them lay a black adventure, and they went towards it, questioning or inarticulate, not knowing why they should endure so much, but facing the utter loneliness of that final passage with patience and great courage.

It was not ridiculous that they should demand their immortality, the least and worst of them. Whether it was granted them or not, it was a just demand, and the answer to it more vital than any other form of knowledge. For it was conceivable that one day they would be too strong and too proud to play the part of tragic buffoons in a senseless farce.

In the meantime men might well be pitiful with one another.

"What was it she had said?"

"Nothing that you've gone through is of any use if it hasn't taught you pity."

("Oh, Francey, Francey, if I had told you that Christine was dead would it have helped? Would you have had more patience with me?")

The quiet and emptiness of his own street restored him in some measure to his aloof scepticism. But even then he knew there was a disruptive force secretly at work in him, tearing down stone by stone his confidence and courage. He was afraid of shadows. A bowed figure crouched against the railings of his house checked him as though a ghost had lain in wait for him. He passed it hurriedly, running up the stone steps. The sound of a thin, clear voice calling him made him turn again, his head thrown up in a sort of defiance.

"Monsieur--excuse--excuse--I wait 'ere so long. They tell me you come back 'ere perhaps. But they don't know I 'ave come. I creep out---- Monsieur she cannot sleep--she cannot sleep. They don't do nothing. It is not right. I cannot 'ave it--that she suffer so."

He came back down the steps. He was conscious of having sighed deeply. He looked into the shrivelled, up-turned face, and saw the tears that filled the furrows with a slow moving stream. He had hardly noticed her before. Now she hurt him. A very little old woman. He said briefly, hiding a shaken voice:

"They do all they can. I can do no more."

She reiterated with a peasant's obstinacy.

"I will not 'ave it--I will not--not 'ave it--I cannot bear it."

"Dr. Rutherford is there. I tell you he can do all that can be done. I offered her an injection--she would not have it."

"She pretend--all ze time she pretend. Even before me, 'er mother, she pretend. But I know."

"Her mother!"

He stepped back against the railings, freeing himself fretfully from the hand that clutched his arm.

"If you are her mother she treats you strangely. She treats you like a servant."

"Before others, Monsieur. She is different--of different stuff. We 'ave always understood. If I am to be with 'er it must be as 'er servant. That is our affair. But you are not kind. You let 'er suffer too much. I will not 'ave it."

She drew herself up. She almost menaced him. He saw that she knew. As a physician he had done what lay in his power, but as a human being he had failed utterly and deliberately. Had always failed. And he was aware of an incredible fear of her.

"I will come now," he stammered.

He gave her such sleep that night that it seemed unlikely that she would ever wake again. He knew that he had exceeded the limits of mercy set down by his profession and that the nurse had looked strangely at him. But he was indifferent. It was as though he, too, had been momentarily released.

Nor did he leave her again until the morning, but watched over her, whilst on the other side of the bed the old woman knelt, her face pressed against a still hand, a battered, sullen effigy of grief.

3

From the beginning she had defied the regulations of the hospital, as she had defied the rules of life, with an absolute success. The inelastic, military system bent and stretched itself beneath her good-humoured inability to believe that there could be any wilful opposition, to her desires. The macaw had been a case in point, the gramophone another. After tea the old woman set the instrument going for her, and when the authorities protested, ostensibly on behalf of neighbouring patients, it transpired that the patients rather liked it than otherwise, and there were regular concerts, with the macaw shrieking its occasional appreciation.

She inquired interestedly into her neighbours. She seemed less concerned with their complaints than with their ages, their appearance, and the time when they would return to the outside world. With a young man on her right hand she became intimate. It began with an exchange of compliments and progressed through little folded notes which caused her infinite amusement to a system of code-tapping on the intervening wall, sufficiently scandalous in import, if her expression were significant.

The nurses became her allies in this last grim flirtation, unaware apparently of its grimness.

"Don't you let 'im know I am so bad," she adjured them. "I tell 'im I 'ave a leetle nothing at all, and that I am going 'ome next week to my dear 'usband. I think that make 'im laugh ver' much. 'E is ver' bored, that young man. 'E say if I 'ave supper with 'im, the first night 'e come out 'e won't--'ow you say?--grouse so much. I say my 'usband ver' jealous, but that I fix it some'ow. 'E like that. Promise you won't tell?"

They promised.

She was almost voiceless now. That she suffered hideously, Stonehouse knew, but not from her. He believed--in the turmoil of his mind he almost hoped--that when she was alone she broke down, but before them all she bore herself with an unflagging gallantry. It was that gallantry of hers that dogged him, that would not let him rest or forget. It demanded of him something that he could not, and dared not, yield.

And she was pitifully alone. The woman in the hospital had not been more forsaken by her world. As to Gyp Labelle she went her way, and the gossip columns cautiously recorded the more startling items of that progress. It was as though some clever hand were building up a fantastic figure that should pass at last into the mists of legend.

Men laughed together over her.

"What poor devil of a millionaire has the woman hobbled now?"

It was the matron who showed Stonehouse an illustrated paper which produced her full-length portrait. She sat on the edge of her absurd fountain and her hand was raised in a laughing gesture of farewell. Over the top was written: "Gyp off to Pastures new," and underneath a message which all the daily papers were to reproduce.

"I want this way to thank all the friends who have been so very kind to me. We have had good times together. I miss you very much. I am going to find new friends now, but one day, I think, I dance for you again. I love you all. I kiss my hands to you. _Au revoir_, Gyp."

It was her vanity, that insatiable desire to figure impudently and triumphantly in the public eye. He brought the paper to her. But at the moment she was busy tapping feebly on the wall. She winked at him.

"Sh! I tell 'im I go to-day. I make an appointment--next week--ze Carlton Grill--seven o'clock--'e 'ave to wait a long time, ze poor young man. There, it is finished."

He showed her the picture without comment. He had to hold it for her--hold it very close--for she had exhausted herself with that last gesture of bravado. And then, as she smiled, a protest born of gathering distress and doubt burst from him.

"Why do you allow--this--hideous, impossible pretence?"

He could feel the old woman turn towards him like a wild beast preparing to spring. But she herself lay still, with closed eyes. He had to bend down to catch the remote suffering whisper.

"_C'est vrai_. We 'ave--such good times. And they come 'ere--all those kind people--who 'ave laughed so much--and bring flowers--and pretend it is not true. And they won't believe--and when they see it they won't believe--they won't dare----" She tried to speak more clearly, clinging to his hand for the first time, whilst a sweat of agony broke out upon her face and made ghastly channels through its paint and powder. "_Vous voyez_--for them--I am--ze good times. They come to me--for good times. When they are too sad--when things too 'ard for them and they cannot believe any more--that ze good times come again--they think of me. '_Voyons, la_ Gyp, she 'ave a good time always--she dance at 'er own funeral!' But if they see me 'ere--like this--they go away--and think in their 'earts: '_Grand Dieu, c'est comme ca avec nous tous_--_avec nous tous_,' and they not laugh with me--any more."

Her hand let go its hold--suddenly.

They sent for him that night. Haemorrhage had set in. There was a light burning by her bedside, for she had complained of the darkness. She wore a lace cap trimmed with blue ribbons, but she had not had strength to paint her lips and cheeks again, and the old woman's efforts had ended pitifully. She had grown very small in the last few hours, and with her thin, daubed face and blood-stained lips, she looked like a sorrowful travesty of the little circus clown who had ridden the fat pony and shouted "_Oh la--la_!" and blown kisses to the people.

She smiled vaguely in Stonehouse's direction, but she was only half conscious. Her hand strayed over the gorgeous quilt, stroking it with a kind of simple pleasure.

(She was like that, too, he thought--a dash of gay, unashamed colour in the sad scheme of things.)

Towards midnight she motioned to him and whispered something that he could not understand. But the old woman rose heavily from her knees and went over to the gramophone, thrusting aside with savage resolution the nurse who tried to intercept her. Stonehouse himself made an involuntary gesture.

"Why not?" he said. "Let her alone."

He stood close to her and waited. He felt that some part of him was dying with her, that he stood with her before a black partition which was thinning slowly, and that presently they would both know whatever lay beyond.

The macaw fidgeted on its golden perch, craning towards the light and blinking uneasily as though a strange thing had come into the room. The needle scratched under a shaking hand.

"I'm Gyp Labelle; Come dance with me. . ."

He bent over her so that his face almost touched hers.

"I'm sorry--I'm sorry, Gyp."

She turned her head a little, her lips moving. It was evident that she had not really heard. But he knew that she had never borne him malice.

And then suddenly it was over. He had broken through. Beyond were understanding and peace and strange and difficult tears. He loved her, as beneath the fret and heat of passion Cosgrave and all those others had loved her, for what she sincerely was and for the brave, gay thing she had to give. He loved her more simply still as in rare moments of their lives men love one another, saying: "This is my brother--this is my sister." From his lonely arrogance his spirit flung itself down, grieving, beside her mysterious, incalculable good.

He could hear the jolly bang-bang of the drum and the whoop of a trumpet. He could see her catherine-wheeling round the stage, and the man with the bloated face and tragic, intelligent eyes.

"Life itself, my dear fellow, life itself."

And she was dead.

EPILOGUE

For a moment they stared at one another. He did not at once recognize Connie Edwards, in the puritanical serge frock and with her air of rather conscious sobriety, and he himself stood in the shadow. He thought:

"She's wondering if I'm a tramp." He felt like one, broken and shabby.

"Dr. Wilmot?" he muttered.

She leant closer.

"Oh, hallo--Robert." She corrected herself severely, and held the door wide open. "Dr. Stonehouse--to be sure. Francey's upstairs."

She led the way. It was almost as though she had been expecting him. At any rate, she was not surprised at all. But half-way up the stairs she glanced back over her shoulder.

"I don't usually open the door. I'm her secretary. And a damn good one too. Rather a jest, eh, what?"

"Rather," he said.

And it was really the same room--a fire burning and the faun dancing in the midst of its moving shadows. There was a faint, warm scent of cigarette smoke and a solemn pile of books beside her deep chair. It wouldn't be like Francey to rest under her laurels.

She held both his hands in hers. She wore a loose, golden-brown wrapper such as she had always worn when she had been working hard. She had changed very little and a great deal. If something of the whimsical mysteriousness of her youth had faded she had broadened and deepened into a woman warm and generous as the earth. Her thick hair swept back from her face with the old wind-blown look, and her eyes were candid and steadfast as they had ever been. But some sort of mist had been brushed away from them so that they saw more clearly and profoundly. He thought: "She has seen a great many people suffer. She doesn't go away so often into herself."

He had tried hard, over and over again, to imagine their meeting, but he had never imagined that it would be so simple or that she would say to him, as though the eight years had not happened:

"Why didn't you tell me about Christine, Robert?"

He said:

"It wouldn't have made any difference."

"I've been waiting for you to tell me."

He tried to smile.

"You don't know how difficult it has been to come. I've been prowling past--night after night--trying to think what you'd say to me, if I turned up."

"You might have known."

"I didn't--I don't know even now."

She had made him sit down by the fire and she sat opposite him, bending towards him, with her slim, beautiful hands to the blaze. He felt that she knew, for all the outward signs of his prosperity, that he was destitute. He felt that his real self with which she had always been so much concerned had been stripped naked, and that she was trying to warm and console him. She was wrapping him round with that unchanged tenderness.

"It's--it's the old room!" he said.

But his enmity was dead. He was at peace with it. He had been initiated. He had heard, very faintly it is true, but loud enough to understand, the music to which the faun danced. He was not the outsider any more.

"I wanted it to be the same."

"And the house----"

"I took it as soon as I could get it. I made up my mind to live here, whatever it cost. You see, I was quite sure that you would go past one of these days to have a look at it, and that you would say to yourself: 'Why, there's Francey, after all! I'll go in----'"

But they both drew back instinctively. He blundered into a hurried question. The Gang? What had happened to them all? It seemed that Gertie still lived, defying medical opinion and apparently feeding her starved spirit on the treasures of the Vatican. Howard, who had become a very bad artist and lived on selling copies of the masterpieces to tourists, looked after her.

"But they're not married," Francey said. "Just friends."

He said humbly:

"Well, he's been awfully decent to her."

As to the rest, no one knew what had become of them.

"And you've done splendidly, Robert, better than any of us."

"I've been a failure," he answered, "a rotten failure!"

She accepted the statement gravely, without protest, and that sincerity was like a skilled hand on a wound. It brought comfort where a fumbling kindness would have been unendurable. It made him strangely, deeply happy to know that she would see too that he had failed. "I've never had pity on anyone--not even myself--I've learnt nothing that matters."

For a while they sat silent, looking into the fire, like people who are waiting and preparing themselves for some great event. And presently, without moving, in an undertone he began to tell her about the Marie Dubois who had died, and how he had seen her long ago at the Circus, his first and only circus. He told her about the Circus itself. He did not choose his words, but stammered and fumbled and jumped from one thing to another. He opened his heart and took out whatever he found there, and showed it to her very humbly, just as it was. It seemed certain and imperative that after a little while they should both see the pattern of it all. He told her about his love for his dead mother, and how his father had died and had come back, haunting him in his sleep.

Then he remembered something he had never thought of before--how he had looked up at the window of the room where his father was lying dead, and had wanted to run--run fast.

"But I think I've lived in that dark house all my life," he said, "and I've gone about in it, blustering and swaggering and being hard and strong because I was so desperately afraid--of life, of caring too much, of failing. And now--I've come out."

And then he began to tremble all over and suddenly he was crying helplessly.

She knelt beside him. She drew him into her arms. It was their moment in the green forest over again, but now there was no antagonism in their love. She was the warm, good spirit of the life to which he had become reconciled. They had belonged to one another from the beginning. His fear had stood between them. But she had gone on loving him, steadfastly, because nothing else was possible to her.

"Francey--do you remember--that time we fought one another--over an idiotic stick? I was such a young rotter--I wouldn't own up--that you were stronger than I was."

She took his wet hands and kissed them. It was as though she had said aloud, smiling to herself:

"It's all right now, anyhow, you odd, sad little boy."