PART II

The Loves and Death of Harry Mortimer Smith

CHAPTER THE FIFTH

FANNY DISCOVERS HERSELF

§ 1

"And now," said Sarnac, "I can draw near to the essentials of life and tell you the sort of thing love was in that crowded, dingy, fear-ruled world of the London fogs and the amber London sunshine. It was a slender, wild-eyed, scared and daring emotion in a dark forest of cruelties and repressions. It soon grew old and crippled, bitter-spirited and black-hearted, but as it happened, death came early enough for me to die with a living love still in my heart...."

"To live again," said Sunray very softly.

"And love again," said Sarnac, patting her knee. "Let me see----...."

He took a stake that had fallen from the fire and thrust it into the bright glow at the centre and watched it burst into a sierra of flames.

"I think that the first person I was in love with was my sister Fanny. When I was a boy of eleven or twelve I was really in love with her. But somehow about that time I was also in love with an undraped plaster nymph who sat very bravely on a spouting dolphin in some public gardens near the middle of Cliffstone. She lifted her chin and smiled and waved one hand and she had the sweetest smile and the dearest little body imaginable. I loved her back particularly, and there was a point where you looked at her from behind and just caught the soft curve of her smiling cheek and her jolly little nose-tip and chin and the soft swell of her breast under her lifted arm. I would sneak round her furtively towards this particular view-point, having been too well soaked in shame about all such lovely things to look openly. But I never seemed to look my fill.

"One day as I was worshipping her in this fashion, half-turned to her and half-turned to a bed of flowers and looking at her askance, I became aware of an oldish man with a large white face, seated on a garden seat and leaning forward and regarding me with an expression of oafish cunning as if he had found me out and knew my secret. He looked like the spirit of lewdness incarnate. Suddenly panic overwhelmed me and I made off--and never went near that garden again. Angels with flaming shames prevented me. Of a terror of again meeting that horrible old man....

"Then with my coming to London Miss Beatrice Bumpus took control of my imagination and was Venus and all the goddesses, and this increased rather than diminished after she had gone away. For she went away and, I gather, married the young man I hated; she went away and gave up her work for the Vote and was no doubt welcomed back by those Warwickshire Bumpuses (who hunted) with the slaughter of a fatted fox and every sort of rejoicing. But her jolly frank and boyish face was the heroine's in a thousand dreams. I saved her life in adventures in all parts of the world and sometimes she saved mine; we clung together over the edges of terrific precipices until I went to sleep, and when I was the conquering Muhammad after a battle, she stood out among the captive women and answered back when I said I would never love her, with two jets of cigarette smoke and the one word, 'Liar!'

"I met no girls of my own age at all while I was errand-boy to Mr. Humberg, my evening classes and my reading kept me away from the facile encounters of the streets. Sometimes, however, when I could not fix my attention upon my books, I would slip off to Wilton Street and Victoria Street where there was a nocturnal promenade under the electric lamps. There schoolgirls and little drabs and errand-boys and soldiers prowled and accosted one another. But though I was attracted to some of the girlish figures that flitted by me I was also shy and fastidious. I was drawn by an overpowering desire for something intense and beautiful that vanished whenever I drew near to reality."

§ 2

"Before a year was over there were several changes in the Pimlico boarding-house. The poor old Moggeridges caught influenza, a variable prevalent epidemic of the time, and succumbed to inflammation of the lungs following the fever. They died within three days of each other, and my mother and Prue were the only mourners at their dingy little funeral. Frau Buchholz fades out of my story; I do not remember clearly when she left the house nor who succeeded her. Miss Beatrice Bumpus abandoned the cause of woman's suffrage and departed, and the second floor was taken by an extremely intermittent couple who roused my mother's worst suspicions and led to serious differences of opinion between her and Matilda Good.

"You see these new-comers never settled in with any grave and sober luggage; they would come and stay for a day or so and then not reappear for a week or more, and they rarely arrived or departed together. This roused my mother's moral observation, and she began hinting that perhaps they were not properly married after all. She forbade Prue ever to go to the drawing-room floor, and this precipitated a conflict with Matilda. 'What's this about Prue and the drawing-room?' Matilda asked. 'You're putting ideas into the girl's head.'

"'I'm trying to keep them from 'er,' said my mother. 'She's got eyes.'

"'_And_ fingers,' said Matilda with dark allusiveness. 'What's Prue been seeing now?'

"'Marks,' said my mother.

"'What marks?' said Matilda.

"'Marks enough,' said my mother. '_'Is_ things are marked one name and _'Er's_ another, and neither of them Milton, which is the name they've given us. And the way that woman speaks to you, as though she felt you might notice sumpthing--friendly like and a bit afraid of you. And that ain't all! By no means all! I'm not blind and Prue isn't blind. There's kissing and making love going on at all times in the day! Directly they've got 'ere sometimes. Hardly waiting for one to get out of the room. I'm not a perfect fool, Matilda. I been married.'

"'What's that got to do with us? We're a lodging-'ouse, not a set of Nosey Parkers. If Mr. and Mrs. Milton like to have their linen marked a hundred different names, what's that to us? Their book's always marked _paid in advance with thanks, Matilda Good_, and that's married enough for me. See? You're an uneasy woman to have in a lodging-house, Martha, an uneasy woman. There's no give and take about you. No save your fare. There was that trouble you made about the boy and Miss Bumpus--ridiculous it was--and now seemingly there's going to be more trouble about Prue and Mrs. Milton--who's a lady, mind you, say what you like, and--what's more--a gentlewoman. I wish you'd mind your own business a bit more, Martha, and let Mr. and Mrs. Milton mind theirs. If they aren't properly married it's they've got to answer for it in the long run, not you. You'll get even with them all right in the Last Great Day. Meanwhile do they do 'arm to anyone? A quieter couple and less trouble to look after I've never had in all my lodging-house days.'

"My mother made no answer.

"'Well?' challenged Matilda.

"'It's hard to be waiting on a shameless woman,' said my mother, obstinate and white-lipped.

"'It's harder still to be called a shameless woman because you've still got your maiden name on some of your things,' said Matilda Good. 'Don't talk such Rubbish, Martha.'

"'I don't see why _'E_ should 'ave a maiden name too--on _'is_ pyjamas,' said my mother, rallying after a moment.

"'You don't know Anything, Martha,' said Matilda, fixing her with one eye of extreme animosity and regarding the question in the abstract with the other. 'I've often thought it of you and now I say it to you. You don't know Anything. I'm going to keep Mr. and Mrs. Milton as long as I can, and if you're too pernikkety to wait on them, there's those who will. I won't have my lodgers insulted. I won't have their underclothes dragged up against them. Why! Come to think of it! Of course! He _borrowed_ those pyjamas of 'is! Or they was given him by a gentleman friend they didn't fit. Or he's been left money and had to change his name sudden like. It often happens. Often. You see it in the papers. And things get mixed in the wash. Some laundries, they're regular Exchanges. Mr. Plaice, he once had a collar with _Fortescue_ on it. Brought it back after his summer holiday. Fortescue! There's evidence for you. You aren't going to bring up something against Mr. Plaice on account of that, Martha? You aren't going to say he's been living a double life and isn't properly a bachelor. Do think a little clearer, Martha. And don't think so much evil. There's a hundred ways round before you think evil. But you _like_ to think evil, Martha. I've noticed it times and oft. You fairly wallow in it. You haven't the beginnings of a germ of Christian charity.'

"'One can't help seeing things,' said my mother rather shattered.

"'_You_ can't,' said Matilda Good. 'There's those who can't see an inch beyond their noses, and yet they see too much. And the more I see of you the more I'm inclined to think you're one of that sort. Anyhow, Mr. and Mrs. Milton stay here--whoever else goes. Whoever else goes. That's plain, I hope, Martha.'

"My mother was stricken speechless. She bridled and subsided and then, except for necessary and unavoidable purposes, remained hurt and silent for some days, speaking only when she was spoken to. Matilda did not seem to mind. But I noticed that when presently Matilda sent Prue upstairs with the Miltons' tea my mother's stiffness grew stiffer, but she made no open protest."

§ 3

"And then suddenly Fanny reappeared in my world.

"It was a mere chance that restored Fanny to me. All our links had been severed when we removed from Cliffstone to London. My brother Ernest was her herald.

"We were at supper in the basement room and supper was usually a pleasant meal. Matilda Good would make it attractive with potatoes roasted in their jackets, or what she called a 'frying-pan' of potatoes and other vegetables in dripping or such-like heartening addition to cold bacon and bread and cheese and small beer. And she would read bits out of the newspaper to us and discuss them, having a really very lively intelligence, or she would draw me out to talk of the books I'd been reading. She took a great interest in murders and such-like cases, and we all became great judges of motive and evidence under her stimulation. 'You may say it's morbid, Martha, if you like,' she said; 'but there never was a murder yet that wasn't brimful of humanity. Brimful. I doubt sometimes if we know what anyone's capable of until they've committed a murder or two.'

"My mother rarely failed to rise to her bait. 'I can't think 'ow you can say such things, Matilda,' she would say....

"We heard the sound of a motor-car in the street above. Brother Ernest descended by the area steps and my sister Prue let him in. He appeared in his chauffeur's uniform, cap in hand, leather jacket and gaiters.

"'Got a night off?' asked Matilda.

"'Court Theatre at eleven,' said Ernest. 'So I thought I'd come in for a bit of a warm and a chat.'

"'Have a snack?' said Matilda. 'Prue, get him a plate and a knife and fork and a glass. One glass of _this_ beer won't hurt your driving. Why! we haven't seen you for ages!'

"'Thank you, Miss Good,' said Ernest, who was always very polite to her, 'I _will_ 'ave a snack. I bin' here, there and everywhere, but it isn't that I haven't wanted to call on you.'

"Refreshment was administered and conversation hung fire for awhile. One or two starts were made and came to an early end. Ernest's manner suggested preoccupation and Matilda regarded him keenly. 'And what have you got to tell us, Ernie?' she said suddenly.

"'We-el,' said Ernest, 'it's a curious thing you should say that, Miss Good, for I _'ave_ got something to tell you. Something--well, I don't know 'ow to put it--curious like."

"Matilda refilled his glass.

"'I seen Fanny," said Ernest, coming to it with violent abruptness.

"'_No!_' gasped my mother, and for a moment no one else spoke.

"'So!' said Matilda, putting her arms on the table and billowing forward, 'you've seen Fanny! Pretty little Fanny that I used to know. And where did you see her, Ernie?'

"Ernest had some difficulty in shaping out his story. 'It was a week last Tuesday,' he said after a pause.

"'She wasn't--not one of Them--about Victoria Station?' panted my mother.

"'Did you see her first or did she see you?' asked Matilda.

"'A week ago last Tuesday,' my brother repeated.

"'And did you speak to her?'

"'Not at the time I didn't. No.'

"'Did she speak to you?'

"'No.'

"'Then 'ow d'you know it was our Fanny?' asked Prue, who had been listening intently.

"'I thought she'd gone to 'er fate in some foreign country--being so near Boulogne,' my mother said. 'I thought them White Slave Traders 'ad the decency to carry a girl off right away from 'er 'ome.... Fanny! On the streets of London! Near 'ere. I told 'er what it would come to. Time and again I told 'er. Merry an 'onest man I said, but she was greedy and 'eadstrong.... 'Eadstrong and vain.... She didn't try to follow you, Ernie, to find out where we were or anything like that?'

"My brother Ernest's face displayed his profound perplexity. 'It wasn't at all like that, mother,' he said. 'It wasn't--that sort of thing. You see----'

"He began a struggle with the breast pocket of his very tightly fitting leather jacket and at last produced a rather soiled letter. He held it in his hand, neither attempting to read it nor offering it to us. But holding it in his hand seemed to crystallise his very rudimentary narrative powers. 'I better tell you right from the beginning,' he said. 'It isn't at all what you'd suppose. Tuesday week it was; last Tuesday week.'

"Matilda Good laid a restraining hand on my mother's arm. 'In the evening I suppose?' she helped.

"'It was a dinner and fetch,' said my brother. 'Of course you understand I 'adn't set eyes on Fanny for pretty near six years. It was 'er knew me.'

"'You had to take these people to a dinner and fetch them back again?' said Matilda.

"'Orders,' said Ernest, 'was to go to one-oh-two Brantismore Gardens Earl's Court top flat, to pick up lady and gentleman for number to be given in Church Row Hampstead and call there ten-thirty and take home as directed. Accordingly I went to Brantismore Gardens and told the porter in the 'all--it was one of these 'ere flat places with a porter in livery--that I was there to time waiting. 'E telephoned up in the usual way. After a bit, lady and gentleman came out of the house and I went to the door of the car as I usually do and held it open. So far nothing out of the ornary. He was a gentleman in evening dress, like most gentlemen; she'd got a wrap with fur, and her hair, you know, was done up nice for an evening party with something that sparkled. Quite the lady.'

"'And it was Fanny?' said Prue.

"Ernest struggled mutely with his subject for some moments. 'Not yet, like,' he said.

"'You mean you didn't recognise her then?' said Matilda.

"'No. But she just looked up at me and seemed kind of to start and got in. I saw her sort of leaning forward and looking at me as 'E got in. Fact is, I didn't think much of it. I should have forgotten all about it if it 'adn't been for afterwards. But when I took them back something happened. I could see she was looking at me.... We went first to one-oh-two Brantismore Gardens again and then he got out and says to me, "Just wait a bit here," and then he helped her out. It sort of seemed as though she was 'arf-inclined to speak to me and then she didn't. But this time I thinks to myself: "I seen you before, somewhere, my Lady." Oddly enough I never thought of Fanny then at all. I got as near as thinking she was a bit like 'Arry 'ere. But it never entered my 'ead it might be Fanny. Strordinary! They went up the steps to the door; one of these open entrances it is to several flats, and seemed to have a moment's confabulation under the light, looking towards me. Then they went on up to the flat.'

"'You didn't know her even then?' said Prue.

"''E came down the steps quarternour after perhaps, looking thoughtful. White wescoat, 'e 'ad, and coat over 'is arm. Gave me an address near Sloane Street. Got out and produced his tip, rather on the large side it was, and stood still kind of thoughtful. Seemed inclined to speak and didn't know what to say. "I've an account at the garage," 'e says, "you'll book the car," and then: "You're not my usual driver," 'e says. "What's your name?" "Smith," I says. "Ernest Smith?" he says. "Yes sir," I says, and it was only as I drove off that I asked myself 'Ow the 'Ell--I reely beg your pardon, Miss Good.'

"'Don't mind me,' said Matilda. 'Go on.'

"'Ow the Juice d'e know that my name was Ernest? I nearly 'it a taxi at the corner of Sloane Square I was so took up puzzling over it. And it was only about three o'clock in the morning, when I was lying awake still puzzling over it, that it came into my 'ead----'

"Ernest assumed the manner of a narrator who opens out his culminating surprise. '--that that young lady I'd been taken out that evening was----'

"He paused before his climax.

"'Fenny,' whispered Prue.

"'Sister Fanny,' said Matilda Good.

"'Our Fanny,' said my mother.

"'_No less a person than Fanny!_' said my brother Ernest triumphantly and looked round for the amazement proper to such a surprise.

"'I thought it was going to be Fenny,' said Prue.

'Was she painted up at all?' asked Matilda.

"'Not nearly so much painted as most of 'em are,' said my brother Ernest. 'Pretty nearly everyone paints nowadays. Titled people. Bishops' ladies. Widows. Everyone. She didn't strike me--well, as belonging to the painted sort particularly, not in the least. Kind of fresh and a little pale--like Fanny used to be.'

"'Was she dressed like a lady--quiet-like?'

"'Prosperous,' said Ernest. 'Reely prosperous. But nothing what you might call extravagant.'

"'And the house you took 'em to--noisy? Singing and dancing and the windows open?'

"'It was a perfectly respectable quiet sort of 'ouse. Blinds down and no row whatever. A private 'ouse. The people who came to the door to say good night might 'ave been any gentleman and any lady. I see the butler. 'E came down to the car. 'E wasn't 'ired for the evening. 'E was a _real_ butler. The other guests had a private limousine with an oldish, careful sort of driver. Whadyou'd speak of as nice people.''

"'Hardly what you might call being on the streets of London,' said Matilda, turning to my mother. 'What was the gentleman like?'

"'I don't want to 'ear of 'im,' said my mother.

"'Dissipated sort of man about town--and a bit screwed?' asked Matilda.

"''E was a lot soberer than most dinner fetches,' said Ernest. 'I see that when 'e 'andled 'is money. Lots of 'em--oh! quite 'igh-class people get--'ow shall I say it?--just a little bit funny. 'Umerous like. Bit 'nnacurate with the door. _'E_ wasn't. That's what I can't make out.... And then there's this letter.'

"Then there's this letter,' said Matilda. 'You better read it, Martha.'

"'How did you get that letter?' asked my mother, not offering to touch it. 'You don't mean to say she gave you a letter!'

"'It came last Thursday. By post. It was addressed to me, Ernest Smith, Esq., at the Garage. It's a curious letter--asking about us. I can't make 'ead or tail of the whole business. I been thinking about it and thinking about it. Knowing 'ow set mother was about Fanny--I 'esitated.'

"His voice died away.

"'Somebody,' said Matilda in the pause that followed, 'had better read that letter.'

"She looked at my mother, smiled queerly with the corners of her mouth down, and then held out her hand to Ernest."

§ 4

"It was Matilda who read that letter; my mother's aversion for it was all too evident. I can still remember Matilda's large red face thrust forward over the supper things and a little on one side so as to bring the eye she was using into focus and get the best light from the feeble little gas-bracket. Beside her was Prue, with a slack curious face and a restive glance that went ever and again to my mother's face, as a bandsman watches the conductor's baton. My mother sat back with a defensive expression on her white face, and Ernest was posed, wide and large, in a non-committal attitude, ostentatiously unable to 'make 'ead or tail' of the affair.

"'Let's see,' said Matilda, and took a preliminary survey of the task before her....

"'_My dear Ernie,_' she says....

"'_My dear Ernie:_

"'_It was wonderful seeing you again. I could hardly believe it was you even after Mr.--Mr.---- _She's written it and thought better of it and scratched it out again, Mr. Somebody--Mr. Blank--_had asked your name. I was beginning to fear I'd lost you all. Where are you living and how are you getting on? You know I went to France and Italy for a holiday--lovely, lovely places--and when I came back I slipped off at Cliffstone because I wanted to see you all again and couldn't bear leaving you as I had done without a word._'

"'She should've thought of that before,' said my mother.

"'_She told me, Mrs. Bradley did, about poor father's accident and death--the first I heard of it. I went to his grave in the cemetery and had a good cry. I couldn't help it. Poor old Daddy! It was cruel hard luck getting killed as he did. I put a lot of flowers on his grave and arranged with Ropes the Nurseryman about having the grass cut regularly._'

"'And 'im,' said my mother, 'lying there! 'E'd 've rather seen 'er lying dead at 'is feet, 'e said, than 'ave 'er the fallen woman she was. And she putting flowers over 'im. 'Nough to make 'im turn in 'is grave.'

"'But very likely he's come to think differently now, Martha,' said Matilda soothingly. 'There's no knowing really, Martha. Perhaps in heaven they aren't so anxious to see people dead at their feet. Perhaps they get sort of kind up there. Let me see,--where was I? Ah?--_grass cut regularly_.

"'_Nobody knew where mother and the rest of you were. Nobody had an address. I went on to London very miserable, hating to have lost you. Mrs. Burch said that mother and Prue and Morty had gone to London to friends, but where she didn't know. And then behold! after nearly two years, you bob up again! It's too good to be true. Where are the others? Is Morty getting educated? Prue must be quite grown up? I would love to see them again and help them if I can. Dear Ernie, I do want you to tell mother and all of them that I am quite safe and happy. I am being helped by a friend. The one you saw. I'm not a bit fast or bad. I lead a very quiet life. I have my tiny little flat here and I read a lot and get educated. I work quite hard. I've passed an examination, Ernie, a university examination. I've learnt a lot of French and Italian and some German and about music. I've got a pianola and I'd love to play it to you or Morty. He was always the one for music. Often and often I think of you. Tell mother, show her this letter, and let me know soon about you all and don't think unkind things of me. 'Member the good times we had, Ernie, when we dressed up at Christmas and father didn't know us in the shop, and how you made me a doll's house for my birthday. Oh! and cheese pies, Ernie! Cheese pies!_'

"'What were cheese pies?' asked Matilda.

"'It was a sort of silly game we had--passing people. I forget exactly. But it used to make us laugh--regular roll about we did.'

"'Then she gets back to you, Morty,' said Matilda,

"'_I'd love to help Morty if he still wants to be educated. I could now. I could help him a lot. I suppose he's not a boy any longer. Perhaps he's getting educated himself. Give him my love. Give mother my love and tell her not to think too badly of me. Fanny._'

"'Fanny. Embossed address on her notepaper. That's all.'

"Matilda dropped the letter on the table. 'Well?' she said in a voice that challenged my mother. 'Seems to me that the young woman has struck one of the Right Sort--the one straight man in ten thousand ... seems to have taken care of her almost more than an ordinary husband might've done.... What'r you going to do about it, Martha?'

"Matilda collected herself slowly from the table and leant back in her chair, regarding my mother with an expression of faintly malevolent irony."

§ 5

"I turned from Matilda's quizzical face to my mother's drawn intentness.

"'Say what you like, Matilda, that girl is living in sin.'

"'Even that isn't absolutely proved,' said Matilda.

"'Why should 'E----?' my mother began and stopped.

"'There's such things as feats of generosity,' said Matilda. 'Still----'

"'No,' said my mother. 'We don't want 'er 'elp. I'd be ashamed to take it. While she lives with that man----'

"'Apparently she doesn't. But go on.'

"'Stainted money,' said my mother. 'It's money she 'as from 'im. It's the money of a Kep Woman.'

"Her anger kindled. 'I'd sooner die than touch 'er money.'

"Her sense of the situation found form and expression. 'She leaves 'er 'ome. She breaks 'er father's 'eart. Kills 'im, she does. 'E was never the same man after she'd gone; never the same. She goes off to shamelessness and luxury. She makes 'er own brother drive 'er about to 'er shame.'

"'Hardly--_makes_,' protested Matilda.

"'Ow was _'E_ to avoid it? And then she writes this--this letter. Impudent I call it. Impudent! Without a word of repentance--not a single word of repentance. Does she 'ave the decency to say she's ashamed of 'erself? Not a word. Owns she's still living with a fancy man and means to go on doing it, glories in it. And offers us 'er kind assistance--us, what she's disgraced and shamed. Who was it that made us leave Cherry Gardens to 'ide our 'eads from our neighbours in London? _'Er_! And now she's to come 'ere in 'er moty-car and come dancing down these steps, all dressed up and painted, to say a kind word to poor mother. 'Aven't we suffered enough about 'er without 'er coming 'ere to show 'erself off at us? It's topsy-turvy. Why! if she come 'ere at all, which I doubt--if she comes 'ere at all she ought to come in sackcloth and ashes and on 'er bended knees.'

"'She won't do that, Martha,' said Matilda Good.

"'Then let 'er keep away. We don't want the disgrace of 'er. She's chosen 'er path and let 'er abide by it. But _'ere_! To come _'ere_! 'Ow'r you going to explain it?'

"'_I'd_ explain it all right,' said Matilda unheeded.

"'Ow am _I_ going to explain it? And here's Prue! Here's this Mr. Pettigrew she's met at the Week-day Evening Social and wants to bring to tea! 'Ow's she going to explain 'er fine lady sister to 'im? Kep Woman! Yes, Matilda, I say it. It's the name for it. That's what she is. A Kep Woman! Nice thing to tell Mr. Pettigrew. 'Ere's my sister, the Kep Woman! 'E'd be off in a jiffy. Shocked 'e'd be out of 'is seven senses. 'Ow would Prue ever 'ave the face to go to the Week-day Evening Social again after a show-up like that? And Ernie. What's 'E going to say about it to the other chaps at the garage when they throw it up at him that 'is sister's a Kep Woman?'

"'Don't you worry about _that_, mother,' said Ernest gently but firmly. 'There's nobody ever throws anything up against me at the garage anyhow--and there won't be. Nohow. Not unless 'E wants to swaller 'is teeth.'

"'Well, there's 'Arry. 'E goes to 'is classes, and what if someone gets 'old of it there? 'Is sister, a Kep Woman. They'd 'ardly let 'im go on working after such a disgrace.'

"'Oh I'd soon----' I began, following in my brother's wake. But Matilda stopped me with a gesture. Her gesture swept round and held my mother, who was indeed drawing near the end of what she had to say.

"'I can see, Martha,' said Matilda, 'just 'ow you feel about Fanny. I suppose it's all natural. Of course, this letter----'

"She picked up the letter. She pursed her great mouth and waggled her clumsy head slowly from side to side. 'For the life of me I can't believe the girl who wrote this is a bad-hearted girl,' she said. 'You're bitter with her, Martha. You're bitter.'

"'After all----' I began, but Matilda's hand stopped me again.

"'Bitter!' cried my mother. 'I _know_ 'er. She can put on that in'cent air just as though nothing 'ad 'appened and try and make you feel in the wrong----'

"Matilda ceased to waggle and began to nod. 'I see,' she said. 'I see. But why should Fanny take the trouble to write this letter, if she hadn't a real sort of affection for you all? As though she need have bothered herself about the lot of you! You're no sort of help to her. There's kindness in this letter, Martha, and something more than kindness. Are you going to throw it back at her? Her and her offers of help? Even if she doesn't crawl and repent as she ought to do! Won't you even answer her letter?'

"'I won't be drawn into a correspondence with 'er,' said my mother. 'No! So long as she's a Kep Woman, she's no daughter of mine. I wash my 'ands of 'er. And as for 'er 'Elp! 'Elp indeed! It's 'Umbug! If she'd wanted 'elp us she could have married Mr. Crosby, as fair and honest a man as any woman could wish for.'

"'So that's _that_,' said Matilda Good conclusively.

"Abruptly she swivelled her great head round to Ernest. 'And what are you going to do, Ernie? Are you for turning down Fanny? And letting the cheese pies just drop into the mud of Oblivium, as the saying goes, and be forgotten for ever and ever and ever?'

"Ernest sat back, put his hand in his trousers pocket and remained thoughtful for some moments. 'It's orkward,' he said.

"Matilda offered him no assistance.

"'There's my Young Lady to consider,' said Ernest and flushed an extreme scarlet.

"My mother turned her head sharply and looked at him. Ernest with a stony expression did not look at my mother.

"'O--oh!' said Matilda. 'Here's something new. And who may your Young Lady be, Ernie?'

"'Well, I 'adn't proposed to discuss 'er 'ere just yet. So never mind what 'er name is. She's got a little millinery business. I'll say that for 'er. And a cleverer, nicer girl never lived. We met at a little dance. Nothing isn't fixed up yet beyond a sort of engagement. There's been presents. Given 'er a ring and so forth. But naturally I've never told 'er anything about Fanny. I 'aven't discussed family affairs with 'er much, not so far. Knows we were in business of some sort and 'ad losses and father died of an accident; that's about all. But Fanny--Fanny's certainly going to be orkward to explain. Not that I want to be 'ard on Fanny!'

"'I see,' said Matilda. She glanced a mute interrogation at Prue and found her answer in Prue's face. Then she picked up the letter again and read very distinctly: 'One hundred and two, Brantismore Gardens, Earl's Court.' She read this address slowly as though she wanted to print it on her memory. 'Top flat, you said it was, Ernie? ...'

"She turned to me. 'And what are you going to do, Harry, about all this?'

"'I want to see Fanny for myself,' I said. 'I don't believe----'

"''Arry,' said my mother, 'now--once for all--I forbid you to go near 'er. I won't 'ave you corrupted.'

"'Don't forbid him, Martha,' said Matilda. 'It's no use forbidding him. _Because he will_! Any boy with any heart and spunk in him would go and see her after that letter. One hundred and two, Brantismore Gardens, Earl's Court,'--she was very clear with the address--'it's not very far from here.'

"'I forbid you to go near 'er, 'Arry,' my mother reiterated. And then realising too late the full importance of Fanny's letter, she picked it up. 'I won't 'ave this answered. I'll burn it as it deserves. And forget about it. Banish it from my mind. There.'

"And then my mother stood up and making a curious noise in her throat like the strangulation of a sob, she put Fanny's letter into the fire and took the poker to thrust it into the glow and make it burn. We all stared in silence as the letter curled up and darkened, burst into a swift flame and became in an instant a writhing, agonised, crackling, black cinder. Then she sat down again, remained still for a moment, and then after a fierce struggle with her skirt-pocket dragged out a poor, old, dirty pocket-handkerchief and began to weep--at first quietly and then with a gathering passion. The rest of us sat aghast at this explosion.

"'You mustn't go near Fanny, 'Arry; not if mother forbids,' said Ernest at last, gently but firmly.

"Matilda looked at me in grim enquiry.

"'I _shall_,' I said, and was in a terror lest the unmanly tears behind my eyes should overflow.

"''Arry!' cried my mother amidst her sobs. 'You'll break--you'll break my heart! First Fanny! Then you.'

"'You see!' said Ernest.

"The storm of her weeping paused as though she waited to hear my answer. My silly little face must have been very red by this time and there was something wrong and uncontrollable about my voice, but I said what I meant to say. 'I shall go to Fanny,' I said, 'and I shall just ask her straight out whether she's leading a bad life.'

"'And suppose she is?' asked Matilda.

"'I shall reason with her,' I said. 'I shall do all I can to save her. Yes--even if I have to find some work that will keep her.... She's my sister....'

"I wept for a moment or so. 'I can't help it, mother,' I sobbed. 'I got to see Fanny!'

"I recovered my composure with an effort.

"'_So,_' said Matilda, regarding me, I thought, with rather more irony and rather less admiration than I deserved. Then she turned to my mother. 'I don't see that Harry can say fairer than that,' she said. 'I think you'll have to let him see her after that. He'll do all he can to save her, he says. Who knows? He might bring her to repentance.'

"'More likely the other way about,' said my mother, wiping her eyes, her brief storm of tears now over.

"'I can't 'elp feeling it's a mistake,' said Ernest, 'for 'Arry to go and see 'er.'

"'Well, anyhow don't give it up because you've forgotten the address, Harry,' said Matilda, 'or else you are done. Let it be your own free-will and not forgetfulness, if you throw her over. One hundred and two Brantismore Gardens, Earl's Court. You'd better write it down.'

"'One hundred and two--Brantismore Gardens.'

"I went over to my books on the corner table to do as she advised sternly and resolutely in a fair round hand on the fly-leaf of Smith's _Principia Latina_."

§ 6

"My first visit to Fanny's flat was quite unlike any of the moving scenes I acted in my mind before-hand. I went round about half-past eight when shop was done on the evening next but one after Ernest's revelation. The house seemed to me a very dignified one and I went up a carpeted staircase to her flat. I rang the bell and she opened the door herself.

"It was quite evident at once that the smiling young woman in the doorway had expected to see someone else instead of the gawky youth who stood before her, and that for some moments she had not the slightest idea who I was. Her expression of radiant welcome changed to a defensive coldness. 'What do you want, please?' she said to my silent stare.

"She had altered very much. She had grown, though now I was taller than she was, and her wavy brown hair was tied by a band of black velvet with a brooch on one side of it, adorned with clear-cut stones of some sort that shone and twinkled. Her face and lips had a warmer colour than I remembered. And she was wearing a light soft greenish-blue robe with loose sleeves; it gave glimpses of her pretty neck and throat and revealed her white arms. She seemed a magically delightful being, soft and luminous and sweet-scented and altogether wonderful to a young barbarian out of the London streets. Her delicacy overawed me. I cleared my throat. 'Fanny!' I said hoarsely, 'don't you know me?'

"She knitted her pretty brows and then came her old delightful smile. 'Why! It's Harry!' she cried and drew me into the little hall and hugged and kissed me. 'My little brother Harry, grown as big as I am! How wonderful!'

"Then she went by me and shut the door and looked at me doubtfully. 'But why didn't you write to me first to say you were coming? Here am I dying for a talk with you and here's a visitor who's coming to see me. May come in at any moment. Now what am I to do? Let me see!'

"The little hall in which we stood was bright with white paint and pretty Japanese pictures. It had cupboards to hide away coats and hats and an old oak chest. Several doors opened into it and two were ajar. Through one I had a glimpse of a sofa and things set out for coffee, and through the other I saw a long mirror and a chintz-covered armchair. She seemed to hesitate between these two rooms and then pushed me into the former one and shut the door behind us.

"'You should have written to tell me you were coming,' she said. 'I'm dying to talk to you and here's someone coming who's dying to talk to me. But never mind! let's talk all we can. How are you? _Well_--I can see that. But are you getting educated? And mother, how's mother? What's happened to Prue? And is Ernest as hot-tempered as ever?'

"I attempted to tell her. I tried to give her an impression of Matilda Good and to hint not too harshly at my mother's white implacability. I began to tell her of my chemist's shop and how much Latin and Chemistry I knew, and in the midst of it she darted away from me and stood listening.

"It was the sound of a latch-key at the door.

"'My other visitor,' she said, hesitated a moment and was out of the room, leaving me to study her furniture and the coffee machine that bubbled on the table. She had left the door a little ajar and I heard all too plainly the sound of a kiss and then a man's voice. I thought it was rather a jolly voice.

'I'm tired, little Fanny; oh! I'm tired to death. This new paper is the devil. We've started all wrong. But I shall pull it off. Gods! if I hadn't this sweet pool of rest to plunge into, I'd go off my head! I'd have nothing left to me but headlines. Take my coat; there's a dear. I smell coffee.'

"I heard a movement as though Fanny had checked her visitor almost at the door of the room I was in. I heard her say something very quickly about a brother.

"'Oh, _Damn_!' said the man very heartily. 'Not another of 'em! How many brothers have you got, Fanny? Send him away. I've only got an hour altogether, my dear----'

"Then the door closed sharply--Fanny must have discovered it was ajar--and the rest of the talk was inaudible.

"Fanny reappeared, a little flushed and bright-eyed and withal demure. She had evidently been kissed again.

"'Harry,' she said, 'I hate to ask you to go and come again, but that other visitor--I'd promised him first. Do you mind, Harry? I'm longing for a good time with you, a good long talk. You get your Sundays, Harry? Well, why not come here at three on Sunday when I'll be quite alone and we'll have a regular good old tea? Do you mind, Harry?'

"I said I didn't. In that flat ethical values seemed quite different to what they were outside.

"'After all, you did ought to have written first,' said Fanny, 'instead of just jumping out on me out of the dark.'

"There was no one in the hall when she showed me out and not even a hat or coat visible. 'Give me a kiss, Harry,' she said and I kissed her very readily. 'Quite sure you don't mind?' she said at her door.

"'Not a bit,' I said. 'I ought to have written.'

"'Sunday at three,' she said, as I went down the carpeted staircase.

"'Sunday at three,' I replied at the bend of the stairs.

"Downstairs there was a sort of entrance hall to all the flats with a fire burning in a fire-place and a man ready to call a cab or taxi for anyone who wanted one. The prosperity and comfort of it all impressed me greatly, and I was quite proud to be walking out of such a fine place. It was only when I had gone some way along the street that I began to realise how widely my plans for the evening had miscarried.

"I had not asked her whether she was living a bad life or not and I had reasoned with her not at all. The scenes I had rehearsed in my mind beforehand, of a strong and simple and resolute younger brother saving his frail but lovable sister from terrible degradations, had indeed vanished altogether from my mind when her door had opened and she had appeared. And here I was with the evening all before me and nothing to report to my family but the profound difference that lies between romance and reality. I decided not to report to my family at all yet, but to go for a very long walk and think this Fanny business over thoroughly, returning home when it would be too late for my mother to cross-examine me and 'draw me out' at any length.

"I made for the Thames Embankment, for that afforded uncrowded pavements and the solemnity and incidental beauty appropriate to a meditative promenade.

"It is curious to recall now the phases of my mind that night. At first the bright realities I came from dominated me: Fanny pretty and prosperous, kindly and self-assured, in her well-lit, well-furnished flat, and the friendly and confident voice I had heard speaking in the hall, asserted themselves as facts to be accepted and respected. It was delightful after more than two years of ugly imaginations to have the glimpse of my dear sister again so undefeated and loved and cared for and to look forward to a long time with her on Sunday and a long confabulation upon all I had done in the meantime and all I meant to do. Very probably these two people were married after all, but unable for some obscure reason to reveal the fact to the world. Perhaps Fanny would tell me as much in the strictest confidence on Sunday and I could go home and astonish and quell my mother with the whispered secret. And even as I developed and cuddled this idea it grew clear and cold and important in my mind that they were not married at all, and the shades of a long-accumulated disapproval dimmed that first bright impression of Fanny's little nest. I felt a growing dissatisfaction with the part I had played in our encounter. I had let myself be handled and thrust out as though I had been a mere boy instead of a brother full of help and moral superiority. Surely I ought to have said something, however brief, to indicate our relative moral positions! I ought to have faced that man too, the Bad Man, lurking no doubt in the room with the mirror and the chintz-covered chair. He had avoided seeing me--because he could not face me! And from these new aspects of the case I began to develop a whole new dream of reproach and rescue. What should I have said to the Bad Man? 'And so, Sir, at last we meet----'

"Something like that.

"My imagination began to leap and bound and soar with me. I pictured the Bad Man, dressed in that 'immaculate evening dress' which my novels told me marked the deeper and colder depths of male depravity, cowering under my stream of simple eloquence. 'You took her,' I would say, 'from our homely but pure and simple home. You broke her father's heart'--yes, I imagined myself saying that!--'And what have you made of her?' I asked. 'Your doll, your plaything! to be pampered while the whim lasts and then to be cast aside!' Or--'tossed aside'?

"I decided 'tossed aside' was better.

"I found myself walking along the Embankment, gesticulating and uttering such things as that."

"But you knew better?" said Firefly. "Even then."

"I knew better. But that was the way our minds worked in the ancient days."

§ 7

"But," said Sarnac, "my second visit to Fanny, like my first, was full of unexpected experiences and unrehearsed effects. The carpet on the pleasant staircase seemed to deaden down my moral tramplings, and when the door opened and I saw my dear Fanny again, friendly and glad, I forgot altogether the stern interrogations with which that second interview was to have opened. She pulled my hair and kissed me, took my hat and coat, said I had grown tremendously and measured herself against me, pushed me into her bright little sitting-room, where she had prepared such a tea as I had never seen before, little ham sandwiches, sandwiches of a delightful stuff called Gentleman's Relish, strawberry jam, two sorts of cake, and little biscuits to fill in any odd corners. 'You are a dear to come and see me, Harry. But I had a sort of feeling that whatever happened you would come along.'

"'We two always sort of hung together,' I said.

"'Always,' she agreed. 'I think mother and Ernie might have written me a line. Perhaps they will later. Ever seen an electric kettle, Harry? This is one. And you put that plug in there.'

"'I know,' I said, and did as I was told. 'There's resistances embedded in the coating. I've been doing some electricity and chemistry. Council classes. Six'r seven subjects altogether. And there's a shop-window in Tothill Street full of such things.'

"'I expect you know all about them,' she said. 'I expect you've learnt all sorts of sciences,' and so we came to the great topic of what I was learning and what I was going to do.

"It was delightful to talk to someone who really understood the thirst for knowledge that possessed me. I talked of myself and my dreams and ambitions, and meanwhile, being a growing youth, my arm swept like a swarm of locusts over Fanny's wonderful tea. Fanny watched me with a smile on her face and steered me with questions towards the things she most wanted to know. And when we had talked enough for a time she showed me how to play her pianola and I got a roll of Schumann that Mr. Plaice had long ago made familiar to me and had the exquisite delight of playing it over for myself. These pianolas were quite easy things to manage, I found; in a little while I was already playing with conscious expression.

"Fanny praised me for my quickness, cleared her tea-things away while I played, and then came and sat beside me and listened and talked and we found we had learnt quite a lot about music since our parting. We both thought great things of Bach,--whom I found I was calling quite incorrectly Batch--and Mozart, who also had to be pronounced a little differently. And then Fanny began to question me about the work I wanted to do in the world. 'You mustn't stay with that old chemist much longer,' she declared. How would I like to do some sort of work that had to do with books, bookselling or helping in a library or printing and publishing books and magazines? 'You've never thought of writing things?' asked Fanny. 'People do.'

"'I made some verses once or twice,' I confessed, 'and wrote a letter to the _Daily News_ about temperance. But they didn't put it in.'

"'Have you ever wanted to write?'

"'What, books? Like Arnold Bennett? Rather!'

"'But you didn't quite know how to set about it.'

"'It's difficult to begin,' I said, as though that was the only barrier.

"'You ought to leave that old chemist's shop,' she repeated. 'If I were to ask people I know and found out some better sort of job for you, Harry, would you take it?'

"'_Rather!_' said I."

"Why not altogether?" interrupted Firefly.

"Oh! we used to say _Rather_," said Sarnac. "It was artistic understatement. But you realise how dreadfully I lapsed from all my preconceived notions about Fanny and myself. We talked the whole evening away. We had a delightful cold picnic supper in a pretty little dining-room with a dresser, and Fanny showed me how to make a wonderful salad with onions very finely chopped and white wine and sugar in the dressing. And afterwards came some more of that marvel, the pianola, and then very reluctantly I took my leave. And when I found myself in the streets again I had once more my former sense of having dropped abruptly from one world into another, colder, bleaker, harder, and with entirely different moral values. Again I felt the same reluctance to go straight home and have my evening dimmed and destroyed by a score of pitiless questions. And when at last I did go home I told a lie. 'Fanny's got a pretty place and she's as happy as can be,' I said. 'I'm not quite sure, but from what she said, I believe that man's going to marry her before very long.'

"My cheeks and ears grew hot under my mother's hostile stare.

"'Did she tell you that?'

"'Practically,' I lied. 'I kind of got it out of her.'

"'But 'e's married already!' said my mother.

"'I believe there is something,' I said.

"'_Something!_' said my mother scornfully. 'She's stolen another woman's man. 'E belongs to 'er--for ever. No matter what there is against 'er. "Whomsoever God Hath Joined, Let No Man Put Asunder!"--that's what I was taught and what I believe. 'E may be older; 'e may have led her astray, but while she and 'e harbour together the sin is 'ers smutch as 'is. Did you see 'im?'

"'He wasn't there.'

"''Adn't the face. That's so much to their credit. And are you going there again?'

"'I've kind of promised----'

"'It's against my wishes, 'Arry. Every time you go near Fanny, 'Arry, you disobey me. Mark that. Let's be plain about that, once and for all.'

"I felt mulish. 'She's my sister,' I said.

"'And I'm your mother. Though nowadays mothers are no more than dirt under their children's feet. Marry 'er indeed! Why should 'e? Likely. 'E'll marry the next one. Come, Prue, take that bit of coal off the fire and we'll go up to bed."

§ 8

"And now," said Sarnac, "I must tell you of the queer business organisation of Thunderstone House and the great firm of Crane & Newberry, for whom, at Fanny's instance, I abandoned Mr. Humberg and his gold-labelled bottles of nothingness. Crane & Newberry were publishers of newspapers, magazines and books, and Thunderstone House was a sort of fountain of printed paper, spouting an unending wash of reading matter into the lives of the English people.

"I am talking of the world two thousand years ago," said Sarnac. "No doubt you have all been good children and have read your histories duly, but at this distance in time things appear very much foreshortened, and changes that occupied lifetimes and went on amidst dense clouds of doubt, misunderstanding and opposition seem to be the easiest and most natural of transitions. We were all taught that the scientific method came into human affairs first of all in the world of material things, and later on in the matters of psychology and human relationship, so that the large-scale handling of steel, and railways, automobiles, telegraphs, flying machines and all the broad material foundations of the new age were in existence two or three generations before social, political and educational ideas and methods were modified in correspondence with the new necessities these things had created. There was a great unanticipated increase in the trade and population of the world and much confusion and conflict, violent social stresses and revolutions and great wars, before even the need of a scientific adjustment of human relationships was recognised. It is easy enough to learn of such things in general terms but hard to explain just what these processes of blind readjustment meant in anxiety, suffering and distress to the countless millions who found themselves born into the swirl of this phase of change. As I look back to that time in which I lived my other life I am reminded of a crowd of people in one of my old Pimlico fogs. No one had any vision of things as a whole; everybody was feeling his way slowly and clumsily from one just perceptible thing to another. And nearly everybody was uneasy and disposed to be angry.

"It is clear beyond question to us now, that the days of illiterate drudges were already past in the distant nineteenth century, for power-machinery had superseded them. The new world, so much more complicated and dangerous, so much richer and ampler, was a world insisting upon an educated population, educated intellectually and morally. But in those days these things were not at all clear, and it was grudgingly and insufficiently that access to knowledge and enlightenment was given by the learned and prosperous classes to the rapidly accumulating masses of the population. They insisted that it should be done by special channels and in a new and different class of school. I have told you of what passed for my education, reading and writing, rudimentary computations, 'jogfry' and so forth. That sort of process, truncated by employment at thirteen or fourteen, when curiosity and interest were just beginning to awaken, was as far as education had gone for the bulk of the common men and women in the opening years of the twentieth century. It had produced a vast multitude of people, just able to read, credulous and uncritical and pitifully curious to learn about life and things, pitifully wanting to see and know. As a whole the community did nothing to satisfy the vague aspirations of those half-awakened swarms; it was left to 'private enterprise' to find what profits it could in their dim desires. A number of great publishing businesses arose to trade upon the new reading public that this 'elementary' education, as we called it, had accumulated.

"In all ages people have wanted stories about life. The young have always wanted to be told about the stage on which they are beginning to play their parts, to be shown the chances and possibilities of existence, vividly and dramatically, so that they may imagine and anticipate their own reactions. And even those who are no longer youthful have always been eager to supplement their experiences and widen their judgment by tales and histories and discussions. There has been literature since there has been writing, since indeed there was enough language for story-telling and reciting. And always literature has told people what their minds were prepared to receive, searching for what it should tell rather in the mind and expectation of the hearer or reader--who was the person who paid--than in the unendowed wildernesses of reality. So that the greater part of the literature of every age has been a vulgar and ephemeral thing interesting only to the historian and psychologist of later times because of the light it threw upon the desires and imaginative limitations of its generation. But the popular literature of the age in which Harry Mortimer Smith was living was more abundant, more cynically insincere, lazy, cheap and empty than anything that the world had ever seen before.

"You would accuse me of burlesque if I were to tell you the stories of the various people who built up immense fortunes by catering for the vague needs of the new reading crowds that filled the hypertrophied cities of the Atlantic world. There was a certain Newnes of whom legend related that one day after reading aloud some item of interest to his family he remarked, 'I call that a regular tit-bit.' From that feat of nomenclature he went on to the idea of a weekly periodical full of scraps of interest, cuttings from books and newspapers and the like. A hungry multitude, eager and curious, was ready to feed greedily on such _hors d'oeuvre_. So _Tit-Bits_ came into existence, whittled from a thousand sources by an industrious and not too expensive staff, and Newnes became a man of wealth and a baronet. His first experiment upon the new public encouraged him to make a number of others. He gave it a monthly magazine full of short stories drawn from foreign sources. At first its success was uncertain, and then a certain Dr. Conan Doyle rose to fame in it and carried it to success with stories about crime and the detection of crime. Every intelligent person in those days, everyone indeed intelligent or not, was curious about the murders and such-like crimes which still abounded. Indeed, there could have been no more fascinating and desirable subject for us; properly treated such cases illuminated the problems of law, training and control in our social welter as nothing else could have done. The poorest people bought at least a weekly paper in order to quicken their wits over murder mysteries and divorces, driven by an almost instinctive need to probe motives and judge restraints. But Conan Doyle's stories had little of psychology in them; he tangled a skein of clues in order to disentangle it again, and his readers forgot the interest of the problem in the interest of the puzzle.

"Hard upon the heels of Newnes came a host of other competitors, among others a certain Arthur Pearson and a group of brothers Harmsworth who rose to great power and wealth from the beginning of a small weekly paper called _Answers_, inspired originally by the notion that people liked to read other people's letters. You will find in the histories how two of these Harmsworths, men of great thrust and energy, became Lords of England and prominent figures in politics, but I have to tell of them now simply to tell you of the multitude of papers and magazines they created to win the errand-boy's guffaw, the heart of the factory girl, the respect of the aristocracy and the confidence of the _nouveau riche_. It was a roaring factory of hasty printing. Our own firm at Thunderstone House was of an older standing than these Newnes, Pearson, Harmsworth concerns. As early as the eighteenth century the hunger for knowledge had been apparent, and a certain footman turned publisher, named Dodsley, had produced a book of wisdom called the _Young Man's Companion._ Our founder, Crane, had done the same sort of thing in Early Victorian times. He had won his way to considerable success with a _Home Teacher_ in monthly parts and with Crane's _Circle of the Sciences_ and a weekly magazine and so forth. His chief rivals had been two firms called Cassell's and Routledge's, and for years, though he worked upon a smaller capital, he kept well abreast of them. For a time the onrush of the newer popular publishers had thrust Crane and his contemporaries into the background and then, reconstructed and reinvigorated by a certain Sir Peter Newberry, the old business had won its way back to prosperity, publishing a shoal of novelette magazines and cheap domestic newspapers for women, young girls and children, reviving the _Home Teacher_ on modern lines with a memory training system and a _Guide to Success_ by Sir Peter Newberry thrown in, and even launching out into scientific handbooks of a not too onerous sort.

"It is difficult for you to realise," said Sarnac, "what a frightful lot of printed stuff there was in that old world. It was choked with printed rubbish just as it was choked with human rubbish and a rubbish of furniture and clothing and every sort of rubbish; there was too much of the inferior grades of everything. And good things incredibly rare! You cannot imagine how delightful it is for me to sit here again, naked and simple, talking plainly and nakedly in a clear and beautiful room. The sense of escape, of being cleansed of unnecessary adhesions of any sort, is exquisite. We read a book now and then and talk and make love naturally and honestly and do our work and thought and research with well-aired, well-fed brains, and we live with all our senses and abilities taking a firm and easy grip upon life. But stress was in the air of the twentieth century. Those who had enough courage fought hard for knowledge and existence, and to them we sold our not very lucid or helpful _Home Teacher_ and our entirely base _Guide to Success_; but great multitudes relaxed their hold upon life in a way that is known now only to our morbid psychologists. They averted their attention from reality and gave themselves up to reverie. They went about the world distraught in a day-dream, a day-dream that they were not really themselves, but beings far nobler and more romantic, or that presently things would change about them into a dramatic scene centring about themselves. These novelette magazines and popular novels that supplied the chief part of the income of Crane & Newberry, were really helps to reverie--mental drugs. Sunray, have you ever read any twentieth-century novelettes?"

"One or two," said Sunray. "It's as you say. I suppose I have a dozen or so. Some day you shall see my little collection."

"Very likely _ours_--half of them,--Crane & Newberry's I mean. It will be amusing to see them again. The great bulk of this reverie material was written for Crane & Newberry by girls and women and by a type of slack imaginative men. These 'authors,' as we called them, lived scattered about London or in houses on the country-side, and they sent their writings by post to Thunderstone House, where we edited them in various ways and put the stuff into our magazines and books. Thunderstone House was a great rambling warren of a place opening out of Tottenham Court Road, with a yard into which huge lorries brought rolls of paper and from which vans departed with our finished products. It was all a-quiver with the roar and thudding of the printing machinery. I remember very vividly to this day how I went there first, down a narrow roadway out of the main thoroughfare, past a dingy public-house and the stage door of a theatre."

"What were you going to do--pack up books? Or run errands?" asked Radiant.

"I was to do what I could. Very soon I was on the general editorial staff."

"Editing popular knowledge?"

"Yes."

"But why did they want an illiterate youngster like yourself at Thunderstone House?" asked Radiant. "I can understand that this work of instructing and answering the first crude questions of the new reading classes was necessarily a wholesale improvised affair, but surely there were enough learned men at the ancient universities to do all the editing and instructing that was needed!"

Sarnac shook his head. "The amazing thing is that there weren't," he said. "They produced men enough of a sort but they weren't the right sort."

His auditors looked puzzled.

"The rank-and-file of the men they sent out labelled M.A. and so forth from Oxford and Cambridge were exactly like those gilt-lettered jars in Mr. Humberg's shop, that had nothing in them but stale water. The pseudo-educated man of the older order couldn't teach, couldn't write, couldn't explain. He was pompous and patronising and prosy; timid and indistinct in statement, with no sense of the common need or the common quality. The promoted office-boy, these new magazine and newspaper people discovered, was brighter and better at the job, comparatively modest and industrious, eager to know things and impart things. The editors of our periodicals, the managers of our part publications and so forth were nearly all of the office-boy class, hardly any of them, in the academic sense, educated. But many of them had a sort of educational enthusiasm and all of them a boldness that the men of the old learning lacked...."

Sarnac reflected. "In Britain at the time I am speaking about--and in America also--there were practically two educational worlds and two traditions of intellectual culture side by side. There was all this vast fermenting hullabaloo of the new publishing, the new press, the cinema theatres and so forth, a crude mental uproar arising out of the new elementary schools of the nineteenth century, and there was the old aristocratic education of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which had picked up its tradition from the Augustan age of Rome. They didn't mix. On the one hand were these office-boy fellows with the intellectual courage and vigour--oh! of Aristotle and Plato, whatever the quality of their intellectual equipment might be; on the other the academic man, affectedly Grecian, like the bought and sold learned man of the days of Roman slavery. He had the gentility of the household slave; he had the same abject respect for patron, prince and patrician; he had the same meticulous care in minor matters, and the same fear of uncharted reality. He criticised like a slave, sneering and hinting, he quarrelled like a slave, despised all he dared despise with the eagerness of a slave. He was incapable of serving the multitude. The new reading-crowd, the working masses, the 'democracy' as we used to call it, had to get its knowledge and its wisdom without him.

"Crane, our founder, had had in his day some inkling of the educational function such businesses as his were bound to serve in the world, but Sir Peter Newberry had been a hard tradesman, intent only on recovering the prosperity that the newer popular publishers had filched away from our firm. He was a hard-driving man; he drove hard, he paid in niggardly fashion and he succeeded. He had been dead now for some years and the chief shareholder and director of the firm was his son Richard. He was nicknamed the Sun; I think because someone had quoted Shakespeare about the winter of our discontent being made summer by this Sun of York. He was by contrast a very genial and warming person. He was acutely alive to the moral responsibility that lay behind the practical irresponsibility of a popular publisher. If anything, he drove harder than his father, but he paid generously; he tried to keep a little ahead of the new public instead of a little behind; the times moved in his favour and he succeeded even more than his father had done. I had been employed by Crane & Newberry for many weeks before I saw him, but in the first office I entered in Thunderstone House I saw the evidences of his personality in certain notices upon the wall. They were printed in clear black letters on cards and hung up. It was his device for giving the house a tone of its own.

"I remember 'We lead; the others imitate,' and 'If you are in any doubt about its being too good put it in.' A third was: 'If a man doesn't know what you know that's no reason for writing as if he was an all-round fool. Rest assured there is something he knows better than you do.'"

§ 9

"It took me some time to get from the yard of Thunderstone House to the office in which these inscriptions were displayed. Fanny had told me to ask for Mr. Cheeseman, and when I had discovered and entered the doorway up a flight of steps, which had at first been masked by two large vans, I made this demand of an extremely small young lady enclosed in a kind of glass cage. She had a round face and a bright red button of a nose. She was engaged, I realised slowly, in removing a foreign stamp from a fragment of envelope by licking the back of the paper. She did not desist from this occupation but mutely asked my business with her eyes.

"'Oran-amoiment?' she asked, still licking.

"'Pardon?'

"'Oran-amoiment?'

"'I'm sorry,' I said, 'I don't get it quite.'

"'Mus' be deaf,' she said, putting down the stamp and taking a sufficient breath for slow loud speech. ''Ave you _gottonappointment_?'

"'Oh!' I said. 'Yes. I was told to come here to-day and see Mr. Cheeseman between ten and twelve.'

She resumed her struggle with the stamp for a time. 'S'pose you don't c'lect stamps?' she asked. ''Sintresting 'obby. Mr. Cheeseman's written a little 'andbook about it. Looking for a job, I suppose? May 'ave to wait a bit. Will you fill up that bit of paper there? Formality we 'ave to insist on. Pencil....'

"The paper demanded my name and my business and I wrote that the latter was 'literary employment.'

"'Lordy,' said the young lady when she read it. 'I thought you was in for the ware'ouse. I say, Florence,' she said to another considerably larger girl who had appeared on the staircase, 'look at 'im. 'E's after litry emplyment.'

"'Cheek!' said the second young lady after one glance at me, and sat down inside the glass box with a piece of chewing gum and a novelette just published by the firm. The young lady with the button nose resumed her stamp damping. They kept me ten minutes before the smaller one remarked: 'Spose I better take this up to Mr. Cheeseman, Flo,' and departed with my form.

"She returned after five minutes or so. 'Mr. Cheeseman says 'E can see you now for one minute,' she said, and led the way up a staircase and along a passage that looked with glass windows into a printer's shop and down a staircase and along a dark passage to a small apartment with an office table, one or two chairs, and bookshelves covered with paper-covered publications. Out of this opened another room, and the door was open. 'You better sit down here,' said the young lady with the button nose.

"'That Smith?' asked a voice. 'Come right in.'

"I went in, and the young lady with the button nose vanished from my world.

"I discovered a gentleman sunken deeply in an arm-chair before a writing-table, and lost in contemplation of a row of vivid drawings which were standing up on a shelf against the wall of the room. He had an intensely earnest, frowning, red face, a large broad mouth intensely compressed, and stiff black hair that stood out from his head in many directions. His head was slightly on one side and he was chewing the end of a lead-pencil. 'Don't see it,' he whispered. 'Don't see it.' I stood awaiting his attention. 'Smith,' he murmured, still not looking at me, 'Harry Mortimer Smith. Smith, were you by any chance educated at a Board School?'

"'Yessir,' I said.

"'I hear you have literary tastes.'

"'Yessir.'

"'Then come here and stand by me and look at these damned pictures there. Did you ever see such stuff?'

"I stood by his side but remained judiciously silent. The drawings I now perceived were designs for a magazine cover. Upon all of them appeared the words 'The New World' in very conspicuous lettering. One design was all flying machines and steamships and automobiles; two others insisted upon a flying machine; one showed a kneeling loin-clothed man saluting the rising sun--which however rose behind him. Another showed a planet earth half illuminated, and another was simply a workman going to his work in the dawn.

"'Smith,' said Mr. Cheeseman, 'it's you've got to buy this magazine, not me. Which of these covers do you prefer? It's your decision. _Fiat experimentum in corpore vili_.'

"'Meaning me, Sir?' I said brightly.

"His bristle eyebrows displayed a momentary surprise. 'I suppose we're all fitted with the same tags nowadays,' he remarked. 'Which do you find most attractive?'

"'Those aeroplane things, Sir, seem to me to be shoving it a bit too hard,' I said.

"'H'm,' said Mr. Cheeseman. 'That's what the Sun says. You wouldn't buy on that?'

"'I don't think so, Sir. It's been done too much.'

"'How about that globe?'

"'Too like an Atlas, Sir.'

"'Aren't geography and travel interesting?'

"'They are, Sir, but somehow they aren't attractive.'

"'Interesting but not attractive. H'm. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings.... So it's going to be that labour chap there in the dawn. You'd buy that, eh?'

"'Is this going to be a magazine about inventions and discoveries and progress, Sir?'

"'Exactly.'

"'Well, the Dawn's good, Sir, but I don't think that sort of Labour Day Cartoon man is going to be very attractive. Looks rheumatic and heavy, Sir. Why not cut him out and keep the dawn?'

"'Bit too like a slice of ham, Smith--thin pink streaks.'

"I was struck by an idea. 'Suppose, Sir, you kept that dawn scene and made it a bit earlier in the year. Buds on the trees, Sir. And perhaps snowy mountains, rather cold and far off. And then you put a hand right across it--just a big hand--pointing, Sir.'

"'Pointing up?' said Mr. Cheeseman.

"'No, Sir, pointing forward and just a little up. It would sort of make one curious.'

"'It would. A woman's hand.'

"'Just a hand I think, Sir.'

"'You'd buy that?'

"'I'd jump at it, Sir, if I had the money.'

"Mr. Cheeseman reflected for some moments, chewing his pencil serenely. Then he spat out small bits of pencil over his desk and spoke. 'What you say, Smith, is exactly what I've been thinking. Exactly. It's very curious.' He pressed a bell-push on his desk and a messenger girl appeared. 'Ask Mr. Prelude to come here.... So you think you'd like to come into Thunderstone House, Smith. I'm told you know a little about science already. Learn more. Our public's moving up to science. I've got some books over there I want you to read and pick out anything you find interesting.'

"'You'll be able to find me a job, Sir?' I said.

"'I've got to find you a job all right. Orders is orders. You'll be able to sit in that room there....'

"We were interrupted by the arrival of Mr. Prelude. He was a tall, thin, cadaverous man with a melancholy expression.

"'Mr. Prelude,' said Mr. Cheeseman, waving his arm at the cover sketches, 'this stuff won't do. It's--it's too banal. We want something fresher, something with a touch of imagination. What I want to see on the cover is--well, say a dawn--a very calm and simple scene, mostly colour, mountain range far away just flushed with sunrise, valley blue and still, high streamer clouds touched with pink. See? Trees perhaps in the foreground--just budding--spring _motif_ and morning _motif_. See? All a little faint and backgroundy. Then a big hand and wrist across the page pointing at something, something high and far away. See?'

"He surveyed Mr. Prelude with the glow of creative enthusiasm on his face. Mr. Prelude looked disapproval. 'The Sun will like that,' he said.

"'It's the goods,' said Mr. Cheeseman.

"'Why not those flying machines?'

"'Why not midges?' asked Mr. Cheeseman.

"Mr. Prelude shrugged his shoulders. 'I've got no use for a magazine on progress without a flying machine or a Zeppelin,' he said. 'Still--it's your affair.'

"Mr. Cheeseman looked a little dashed by his colleague's doubt, but he held to his idea. 'We'll get a sketch made,' he said. 'How about Wilkinson?'

"They discussed some unknown Wilkinson as a possible cover designer. Then Mr. Cheeseman turned to me. 'By the by, here's a youngster we've got to make use of, Prelude. We don't know what he can do, but he seems intelligent. I thought we'd use him to sift some of those scientific books. What he likes, _they'll_ like. _I_ can't read that stuff. I'm too busy.'

"Mr. Prelude surveyed me. 'You never know what you can do till you try,' he said. 'Do you know anything of science?'

"'Not very much,' I said. 'But I've done some physiography and chemistry and a little geology. And read a lot.'

"'You don't want to know very much,' said Mr. Prelude. 'You're better without it here. Makes you High-Brow. High-Brow goes to tens of thousands, but Crane & Newberry go to hundreds of thousands. Not that our brows aren't rising some in this establishment. Educational and improving, we're going to be. So far as is consistent with our profits. See that notice,--_We lead_? All the same, Cheeseman,' said Mr. Prelude, 'the thing that has sold, the thing that sells and the thing that's going to sell, is the magazine with a pretty girl on the cover--and the less costume the better. Consistent with decency. Now here--what's your name?'

"'Smith, Sir.'

"'Smith. And here's all these covers on the book-stall. And then I produce _this_. Which does he buy?'

"_This_ was the cover of the summer number of Newberry's Story Magazine, on which two young ladies in skin-tight bathing dresses disported themselves on a sandy beach.

"'Smith goes for this,' said Mr. Prelude triumphantly.

"I shook my head.

"'You mean to say that isn't attractive?' said Mr. Cheeseman, turning in his chair and pointing with his well-chewed pencil.

"I reflected.

"'There's never anything about them inside,' I said.

"'Got you there, Prelude!' said Mr. Cheeseman.

"'Not a bit. He bought six or seven before he found that out. And most of 'em forgot about it when they read inside.'"

§ 10

"I found my introduction to Thunderstone House far less terrifying than I had anticipated. It was gratifying to have come so near to what Mr. Cheeseman had thought about the magazine cover, and there were presently other very reassuring coincidences of the same sort. I was immediately interested in the editorial and publishing work that was going on about me, and my mind took one of those forward strides that are characteristic of adolescence. I was still a boy when I left Mr. Humberg; I had not been with Crane & Newberry six weeks before I perceived that I was a capable and responsible young man. I began to form opinions rapidly, to write with confidence; even my handwriting suddenly grew up from a careless or over-careful boyish scrawl to a consistent and characteristic script. I began to think about the clothes I was wearing and of the impression I made upon other people.

"In quite a little time I was writing short contributions to some of our minor weeklies and monthlies and suggesting articles and 'features' as we called them to Mr. Cheeseman. The eighteen shillings a week at which I started went up in a series of jerks to three pounds, which was quite a big salary in those days for a youngster not yet eighteen. Fanny took the keenest interest in my work and displayed an extraordinary understanding of its conditions. She seemed to know all about Mr. Cheeseman and Mr. Prelude and the rest of my colleagues directly I mentioned them.

"One day I was working in the room next to Mr. Cheeseman's with another youngster called Wilkins at a rather odd little job. One of the authors our firm employed had written a long story for the _Story Reader's Paradise_, and it had been set up by the printers and passed for press before it was discovered that in a careless moment she had given her chief villain the name of a very prominent lawyer who unhappily also had a country house in a village almost identical in name with the corresponding village in the story. The prominent lawyer might see fit to consider this use of his name as libellous and make trouble for us. So Wilkins and I were going through two sets of proofs, one to check the other, and we were changing the name of the prominent lawyer to an entirely different one whenever it occurred. To brighten the task we had made a game of it. Each one raced down his galley proof and called the name of 'Reginald Flake' whenever he found it and scored a point for every name he called first. I was some points up when I heard a voice in the passage that seemed oddly familiar to me. 'They're all spread out on my desk, sir, if you like to come into my room,' I heard Mr. Cheeseman say.

"'Fay-nits,' said Wilkins. 'It's the Sun.'

"I turned round as the door opened and saw Mr. Cheeseman holding the door open for a good-looking youngish man, with rather handsome regular features and a sort of bang of brown hair over his forehead. He wore a pair of very round large spectacles with glasses tinted a faint yellow colour. He met my eyes and an expression of partial recognition came into his and faded again. Either he recognised me or he recognised a resemblance in me. He followed Mr. Cheeseman across the room. Then he turned sharply.

"'Of course,' he said smiling and returning a step or two towards me. 'You must be young Smith. How are you getting on here?'

"'I'm working for Mr. Cheeseman mostly,' I said standing up.

"He turned to Mr. Cheeseman.

"'Very satisfactory, sir. Quick, interested; he'll do well here.'

"'I'm glad to hear it--very glad. Everyone has a chance here and there's no favours. No favours. The best man does the job. Glad to see you among the directors whenever you care to come up to us, Smith.'

"'I'll do my best, Sir.'

"He hesitated, smiled again in a very friendly way and went into Mr. Cheeseman's room....

"'Where are we?' I said. 'Middle of galley 32? Score, 22-29.'

"'How d'you know _'im_?' asked Wilkins in a fierce undertone.

"'I don't know him,' I said, suddenly hot and flushed. 'I've never seen him before.'

"'Well, he knew you.'

"'He's heard about me.'

"'Who from?'

"'How the deuce should _I_ know?' I asked with needless heat.

"'Oh!' said Wilkins and reflected. 'But----'

"He glanced at my troubled face and said no more.

"But at the game of 'Reginald Flake' he overhauled me and beat me at the end of the book, 67-42."

§ 11

"I concealed altogether from my mother the share that Fanny had had in getting me my new job and all the opportunities it carried with it in Thunderstone House, and so it was possible for her to find some pride and satisfaction in my increasing prosperity. I was presently able to double and then still further to increase my contribution to the household expenses, and I exchanged my attic, which was handed over to Prue for her very own, for the room which had once sheltered the old Moggeridges. It was rearranged as a bed-sitting room for me, and soon I had first one and then several shelves full of books and a writing-desk of my own.

"And also I concealed from my mother, for there was no use in distressing her, the frequency of my visits to Fanny. We began to make little excursions together, for Fanny, I discovered, was often very lonely. Newberry was a very busy man, and often he could not come near her for ten days or a fortnight, and although she had some women friends, and classes and lectures, there were gaps often of several days when she would have had no one to speak to but the servant who came in daily to her, if it had not been for me. But all this companioning of Fanny I tried to hide from my mother, though now and then her suspicions stabbed my falsehoods. Ernie and Prue, however, were able to follow the calls of love unhampered by the family shame, and presently they were both engaged and his young lady and her young man were brought to a Sunday tea-party in the drawing-room--through the kind permission of Mr. and Mrs. Milton who were, as usual, 'away.' Ernie's Young Lady--I've completely forgotten her name--proved to be a well-dressed, self-possessed young woman with a vast knowledge of people in what we used to call 'society'; she talked freely and fashionably, taking the larger share of the conversation, of Ascot and Monte Carlo and the Court. Prue's Mr. Pettigrew was of a more serious quality, and of the things he said I remember now only that he expressed a firm conviction that Messages from the Dead were Bound to Come in a few years' time. He was a chiropodist and very well thought of in chiropodological circles."

"Stop!" cried Radiant. "What is this? You are talking nonsense, Sarnac. What is chiropodological--hand--foot--scientific?"

"I thought you'd ask me that," said Sarnac, smiling. "Chiropody was--corn-cutting."

"Corn-cutting--harvesting," said Starlight. "But where do the hands and feet come in? There were machines then, were there not?"

"No, this was a different sort of corn. Mr. Humberg's shop was full of corn-salves and corn-cures. Corns were painful and tiresome callosities produced on people's feet by the pressure of ill-fitting boots. We don't know of such things nowadays, but they darkened scores of lives in Pimlico."

"But why did they wear ill-fitting boots?" demanded Radiant. "Oh!--never mind. Never mind. I know. A mad world which made boots at hazard without looking at the feet that had to wear them! And wore boots that hurt it when no sane people would dream of wearing boots! Go on with your story."

"Let me see," said Sarnac. "I was talking of a tea-party, a family tea-party in the drawing-room--in which we talked of everything in the world but my sister Fanny. And quite a little while after that tea-party my mother fell ill and died.

"It was a swift and sudden illness. She caught a cold and would not go to bed. When she did go to bed, she got up after one day of it, because she couldn't bear to think of all that Prue might be doing or not doing in the house-work downstairs. And her cold turned to pneumonia, the same sort of inflammation that had carried off the Moggeridges, and she died in three days.

"Now when the fever came upon her she changed suddenly from something white and hard and unapproachable to something flushed and pitiful. Her face grew smaller and younger looking, her eyes bright, and something came into them that reminded me of Fanny when Fanny was distressed. And all my habit of sullen resistance to my mother melted when I saw her struggling for breath on her tumbled pillow and realised that she might be near the end of all her hates and drudgeries. Matilda Good became again the old friend who had known her since she was a young woman, and they called each other 'Tilda' and 'Marty' instead of Matilda and Martha. Matilda for all her varicose veins was up and down stairs fifty times a day; and there was much sending out for expensive things, the more expensive the better, that Matilda thought my mother might 'fancy.' They stood appealingly untouched upon the table by her bedside. Once or twice towards the end my mother asked for me, and when I came in the evening and bent over her she whispered hoarsely, ''Arry boy--promise me! ... Promise me! ...'

"I sat down and took the hand she held out to me, and so holding to me, she dozed.

"What she wanted me to promise she never said; and whether it was some last vow she wanted to extract from me that would separate me from Fanny for ever, or whether her thoughts about Fanny had changed under the shadow of death and she had some new message for her, I cannot imagine to this day. Perhaps she herself did not know what I had to promise; a dying desire for predominance moved her. Will stirred in her and faded again to nothing. 'Promise me!' Fanny she never mentioned by name and we did not dare to bring my sister in to her. Ernest came and kissed her and knelt down by the bedside and suddenly, dreadfully wept aloud like the child he was and set us all weeping; he was her firstborn and her dearest, he had known her before her final embitterment, he had always been a dutiful son to her.

"Presently she was lying there very straight and still, as hushed and still as my father's shop on Sundays, and the traffics and struggles and angers of life had done with her for ever. Her face was now neither young nor old, a marble face of peace. All her peevish resentment was smoothed and wiped away. It had never occurred to me before that she had or had not good looks, but now I saw that Fanny's fine regularity of feature came from her. She was like Fanny, like an immobile, unhumorous Fanny.

"I stood beside her still body oppressed by a grief too wide and deep for tears, an immense grief that was not so much for her as for all that distress of life she had embodied. For now I saw that there was not and there never had been anything hateful in her; I saw for the first time the devotion of her, the misguided passion for right, the mute, blundering, tormented and tormenting love in her heart. Even her love of Fanny was a love capsized and inverted; her fallen daughter had been to her a detested changeling for the pretty clever little girl who was to have been a paragon of feminine virtue. Except for Ernest how bitterly and repeatedly had we children offended her rigid and implacable standards, Fanny and I openly and rebelliously and Prue by discovery! For Prue--I will not tell you the details of Matilda's exposure--pilfered.

"Long before we children began to thwart my mother there must have been a still more monstrous disappointment for her. What sort of dreams of manly piety and decorum had she wrapped about my poor, maundering, ramshackle, loose-limbed father when he and she walked out together in their Sunday clothes, making the best and more than the best of themselves? He must have been a tall, good-looking, young man then, and reassuringly apt with pious reflections. What shocks had he, gross, clumsy, wayward, ignorant and incompetent as the dear man was, inflicted upon her set and limited expectations?

"And then think of my Uncle John Julip again, that wonderful and adored elder brother with the manners of a sporting baronet, who had slowly shrivelled down to the figure of a drunken thief! Everything had shrivelled for her,--poor soul! In our streets in those old days men were permitted to sell brightly coloured distended bladders to children, the most apt instruments for acute disappointment you can imagine; and the life God had given my mother was very like one of these bladders. It had burst and shrivelled down to a limp and empty residue that nothing could ever restore. She had faced her declining days, prematurely wrinkled, weary, laborious and unloved except by one dutiful son....

"Yes, the thought of Ernest was a consolation to me. Surely his loyalty had meant happiness for her."

Sarnac paused. "I find it impossible," he said, "to disentangle my thoughts as I stood by my mother's death-bed from a thousand things that have come to me since about her. I have had to tell of her as an antagonist, as a hard, uncharitable soul. That was her rôle in my story. But she was indeed just the creature and victim of that disordered age which had turned her natural tenacity to a blind intolerance and wasted her moral passion upon ugly and barren ends. If Fanny and Ernest and I had shown any stoutness against the disadvantages of our start in life, if we had won for ourselves any knowledge or respect, we inherited that much steadfastness from her; such honesty as we had was hers. If her moral harshness had overshadowed and embittered our adolescence, her passionate mothering had sheltered our childhood. Our father would have loved us, wondered at us and left us about. But early in her life, that fear, that terror-stricken hatred of sex that overshadowed the Christian centuries, that frantic resort to the suppressions, subjugations and disciplines of a stereotyped marriage in its harshest form, a marriage as easy to step into and as hard to leave as a steel trap with its teeth hidden by the most elaborate secrecies and misrepresentations, had set its pitiless grip upon my mother's imagination and blackened all the happier impulses in life for her. She was ready, if necessary, to pass all her children through the fires of that Moloch, if by so doing their souls might be saved. She did it the more bitterly because she was doing it against the deeper undeveloped things in her own nature.

"Such things, more dimly appreciated perhaps, passed through the mind of Harry Mortimer Smith, my former self, as he stood beside his dead mother. He was torn--I was torn--by a sense of irrational separation and by the haunting persuasion of lost opportunities. There were things I felt that I might have said, propitious moments I might have seized to make things better between us. I had differed from her so harshly; I might have been so much kinder to her and still have held my way. She lay there a feeble, little, old woman, thin, worn and prematurely aged. How often had I struck at her with all my rebel strength, blind to the fact that I could wound her as only a child can wound the mother who bore it. She had been darkened and I also had been darkened, and now--now it was all too late. The door had closed between us. And was closed for ever. For ever...."

§ 12

"The year and a half that intervened between my mother's death and the beginning of the First World War--the War that came before the Poison Gas War and the Great Desolation--were years of rapid growth for me, mental and physical alike. I remained with Matilda Good because I had come to love that clumsy, wise, friendly creature almost as if she was my second mother, but now I was prosperous enough to occupy the whole of the second floor and to have a sitting-room separate from my bedroom. I still came down to the underground breakfast-room for breakfast or supper or high tea because I liked talking with Matilda. Prue had married Mr. Pettigrew by that time, and in her stead two grey and sedulous women came in--they were sisters, one a spinster and the other the wife of a broken-down prize-fighter--to do the drudgeries Prue and my mother had done.

"My chief companion in those days was my sister Fanny. Our childhood's alliance was renewed and strengthened. We had a need for each other; we were able to help each other as no one else could help us. I found out very soon that Fanny's life was divided into two very unequal parts; that she had hours and sometimes days of excitement and happiness with Newberry, who loved her greatly and gave her all the time he could steal away for her and introduced her to such friends as he could trust to respect her and keep their secret, and also she had long stretches of uneventful solitude in which she was terribly left to herself. My sister Fanny was plucky and loyal and devoted, but before we two got together again I think she found those grey intervals of suspended animation dreary and dangerous and sometimes almost intolerable. Often she had nothing to live for at all, nothing bright and vital, but the almost daily note, a hasty word or so he scribbled to her. And the better he was, the worse it was for her. The fact that he was pleasant and delightful and deeply in love with her, the very brightness of being with him, made those great intervals seem darker and duller."

"Hadn't she work?" asked Sunray.

"And fellow workers, and other women?" asked Firefly.

"Not in her position. Not as an unmarried woman--of lowly origins--with a lover."

"But there were others in the same position? Surely there were many!"

"A scattered class, a class made to be ashamed of itself. Newberry and Fanny were lovers, such lovers as we are to-day; they got through with it and at last, I believe, they married according to the custom of the time. But they were the exceptional ones, they knew what they wanted and had stout hearts. Most of these irregular unions succumbed to the boredom in between and to the temptations of separation. Forgetfulness and jealousy played havoc with these insecure couples. The girls in their phases of loneliness picked up with other men and the first lover suspected their infidelities and strayed away. I have a lot to tell you yet about jealousy in the old world; it was not regarded as an ugly thing but as a rather high-spirited thing. People let it go and were proud of it. And the majority of these irregular unions were not even love unions in the first place, they were vice unions, dishonest on either side. Drugs and drink crept very easily into lives divided between over-excitement and tedium and darkened by a general disapproval. The defiant pose was the easiest pose. The unmarried lover was made a social outcast and driven towards other sorts of social outcasts, more evil and unhappy.... You see perhaps now why my sister Fanny was rather alone and aloof, for all that she belonged to a numerous class.

"I suppose," said Sarnac, "that the object of that rigid legal marriage of the old world was to keep lovers together. In countless cases it kept the wrong people together and lovers apart. But then you must remember that in those days children were supposed to be providential accidents; they were indeed accidents of cohabitation and that altered all the conditions of the question. There were no proper schools for children, no sort of refuge if the parents parted and tore the home asunder. We are so secure; it is hard to imagine now the chancy insecurity of the ancient days. It is hard to imagine the dangers that hung about an unprotected child. In our world nowadays we all seem to get paired; sooner or later each finds a mate and marriage is a natural and necessary relationship instead of a compulsory device. All the priests of all the religions that have ever been in the world could not bind me to Sunray more firmly than I am bound to-day. Does one get a book and an altar to marry the axe to its handle? ...

"None of which does in the least degree affect the fact that my sister Fanny suffered dreadfully from loneliness before she rediscovered me.

"She was full of curiosities and enterprise, and she took possession of my leisure to explore all sorts of shows and resorts in and about old London, museums, picture-galleries, parks, gardens and heaths, that I should otherwise never have visited. Indeed she might not have visited them either if I had not been available as her escort, because in that world of crazy suppressions, most of these places were haunted by furtive love-hunters and feeble-minded folk who might have been irritating and tiresome to a solitary girl so pretty as Fanny. They would have followed her about and accosted her when they got her alone, and thrust their disagreeable cravings between her and the beauty and sunshine.

"But together we went gaily to all sorts of interesting things. This old London I am describing to you had a large share of parks and gardens; there was a pleasing quaintness about all of them and much unpremeditated loveliness. There was a certain Richmond Park, to which we often resorted, with many fine old trees and grassy spaces and wildernesses of bracken, that got very yellow and gay in autumn, and a quantity of deer. You might have been transported from this age to Richmond Park two thousand years ago, and still fancied yourself in the northland parks of to-day. The great trees, like nearly all trees in those days, were, it is true, infested with fungus and partly decayed, but Fanny and I never noticed that. They seemed great healthy trees to us. And there was a view from a hill-crest of the winding Thames, a very delightful view. And then there were the oddest old gardens and flower spaces at Kew. I remember a quite good rock-garden and glass-houses of flowers; the brightest flowers the old world imagined possible. And there were paths through a jungle of rhododendra, primitive small rhododendra, but bright coloured and a great delight to Fanny and me. There was a place where we had tea at little tables in the open air. In that frowsty old germ-saturated world with its dread of draughts and colds and coughs it gave one a bright sense of adventure to eat food in the open air.

"We went to museums and picture-galleries and talked about what the pictures meant and we talked of a thousand things together. There comes back to me one conversation we had at a place called Hampton Court, a queer, old, red-brick palace with a great grape-vine under glass and an ancient garden beside the Thames. There were flower-beds full of half-wild herbaceous flowers, and we walked beside them under trees until we came to a low wall that looked upon the river, and we sat down on a seat and there, after a silence, suddenly Fanny, like one who has been pent up beyond endurance, began talking of love.

"She began by asking questions about the girls I had met and the girls at Thunderstone House. I described one or two of them to her. My chief friend among them was Milly Kimpton from the counting-house; we had got to the pitch of taking teas together and such-like friendly acts. 'That's not love,' said Fanny the wise, 'lending each other books. You don't begin to know what love is yet, Harry.

"'But you will, Harry--you will.

"'Don't you be too late about it, Harry. There's nothing in life like loving someone, Harry. People don't talk to you about it and lots of people don't know what they are missing. It's all the difference between being nothing or something. It's all the difference between being dead or alive. When you are really loving someone you're all right and nothing can harm you. And when you aren't, nothing is right, everything is wrong. But love is a queer thing, Harry, and about as dreadful as it is dear. It gets wrong. Sometimes it all goes wrong and it's awful; it slips from you somehow; it goes and you're left mean and little--ever so mean!--and you can't get back and it seems you hardly want to get back. You're dead and you're damned and done for, and then again it all comes back again like the sunrise--like being born afresh.'

"And then with a desperate shamelessness she began to talk of Newberry and how much she loved him. She told little irrelevant things about his 'ways.' 'He comes to me whenever he can,' she said, and repeated this presently. 'He's all my life,' she said. 'You don't know what he is to me....'

"Then her constant dread of a separation crept up to the surface of her thoughts.

"'Perhaps,' she said, 'it will always go on like this.... I don't care if it does, I don't care if I never marry him. I wouldn't care--not if at last I'm thrown aside. I'd go through it all again and count myself lucky even if I knew for certain I was to be dropped and cast aside.'

"Queer Fanny! Her face was flushed and her eyes shining with tears. I asked myself what had been happening.

"'He'll never throw me aside, Harry. He'll never throw me aside. He can't. He can't. He's half as old again as I am and yet he comes to me in his trouble. Once---- Once he cried to me. Men, all of you, are so strong and yet so helpless....

"'You've got to have a woman to come to....

"'Just a little while ago---- Well---- He was ill. He was very ill. He has pain in his eyes and sometimes he's afraid about them. This time, suddenly, he had frightful pains. And he thought he couldn't see. He came straight to me, Harry. He called a cab and came to me, and he came feeling his way upstairs to me and fumbling at the door; and I nursed him in my darkened room until the pain had gone. He didn't go home, Harry, where there were servants and nurses to be got and attendants and everything; he came to me. It was me he came to. Me! He's my man. He knows I'd give my life for him. I would, Harry. I'd cut my body to pieces bit by bit, if it would make him happy.

"'It wasn't so much the pain he had, Harry, as the fear. He's not the one to mind a bit of pain or be afraid of many things. But he was afraid and scared. He'd never been afraid before, but he was afraid of going blind--he was too afraid to go to the specialist. It was like a little child, Harry, and him so big and strong--afraid of the dark. He thought they'd get hold of him so that perhaps he'd not be able to come to me. He thought he wouldn't be able to see his beloved magazines and papers any more. And the pain just turned the screw on him. He clung to me.

"'It was me made him go. I took him there. He wouldn't have gone if it hadn't been for me. He'd have just let things drift on and not a soul in the world, for all his money and power, to mother him. And then he might really have gone blind if it hadn't been taken in time. I pretended to be his secretary and I took him and waited in the waiting-room for him. I dreaded they'd hurt him. I was listening for something to happen all the time. I had to look at their old _Graphics_ as if I didn't care a rap what they were doing to him. And then he came out smiling with a green shade on and I had to stand up stiff and cool and wait to hear what he had to say. I was scared by that shade, Harry. Scared! I held my breath. I thought it had come. "It isn't so bad as we fancied, Miss Smith," he says--offhand like. "You kept the taxi? You'll have to take my arm I'm afraid." "Certainly sir," I said, mimpsy-like. I was careful to be kind of awkward taking his arm. There were people there in the waiting-room and you never know. Acted respectful. Me!--that has had him in my arms a thousand times.

"'But when we were in the taxi and safe he pushed up the shade and took me into his arms and he hugged me and he cried--he cried wet tears. And held me. Because he'd got me still and his sight still and the work he loves to do. Things would have to be done to his eyes but he'd keep his sight--and he has. There's been no trouble now. Not for months.'

"She sat looking away from me over the shining river.

"'How could he ever leave me?' she said. 'After a time like that?'

"Stoutly she spoke, but even to my youthful eyes she seemed little and lonely, sitting there on the old red wall.

"I thought of the busy bustling man with the big tortoise-shell glasses away from her, and of one or two things I had heard whispered about him. It seemed to me then that no men were good enough for the women in the world.

"'When he's tired or in trouble,' said Fanny, sure and still, 'he'll always come back to me.'"

CHAPTER THE SIXTH

MARRIAGE IN WAR TIME

§ 1

"And now," said Sarnac, "comes a change of costume. You have been thinking of me, I suppose, as a gawky youth of seventeen or eighteen, dressed in those ill-fitting wholesale clothes we used to call 'ready-mades.' That youth wore a white collar round his neck and a black jacket and dark grey trousers of a confused furtive patterning and his hat was a black hemisphere with a little brim, called a Bowler. Now he changes into another sort of 'ready-mades,' even more ill-fitting,--the khaki uniform of a young British soldier in the Great World War against Germany. In 1914 Anno Domini, a magic wand, the wand of political catastrophe, waved to and fro over Europe, and the aspect of that world changed, accumulation gave place to destruction and all the generation of young men I have described as being put together from such shops as those one saw in Cheapside, presently went into khaki and fell into ranks and tramped off to the lines of ditches and desolation that had extended themselves across Europe. It was a war of holes and barbed wire and bombs and big guns like no war that had ever happened before. It was a change of phase in the world muddle. It was like some liquid which has been growing hotter and hotter, suddenly beginning to boil and very swiftly boiling over. Or it was like a toboggan track in the mountains, when after a long easy, almost level run, one comes to a swift drop and a wild zig-zag of downward curves. It was the same old downward run at a dramatic point.

"Change of costume there was and change of atmosphere. I can still recall the scared excitements of the August days when the war began and how incredulous we English were when we heard that our own little army was being driven back before the German hosts like a spluttering kitten pushed by a broom, and that the French lines were collapsing. Then came the rally of September. At the beginning we British youngsters had been excited spectators, but as the tale of our army's efforts and losses came home to us we crowded to the recruiting offices, by thousands and scores of thousands, until at last our volunteers could be counted by the million. I went with the crowd.

"It may seem a curious thing to you that I lived through all the Great World War against Germany, that I was a soldier in it and fought and was wounded and went back and took part in the final offensive, that my brother Ernest became a sergeant and won a medal for gallantry and was killed within a few weeks of the concluding Armistice, that all the circumstances of my life were revolutionised by the war and that nevertheless it does not come into the story of my life as a thing of importance in itself to that story. As I think of it now, I think of the Great World War as a sort of geographical or atmospheric fact, like living ten miles from your working place or being married in an April shower. One would have to travel the ten miles every day or put up an umbrella as one came out of church, but it wouldn't touch what one was intimately or alter in any essential the living substance of one's life. Of course the World War killed and tortured millions of us, impoverished us all and dislocated the whole world. But that only meant that so many millions went out of life and that there was a fractional increase in everyone's anxiety and disorder; it didn't change the nature and passions, the ignorances and bad habits of thought of the millions who remained. The World War arose out of these ignorances and misconceptions and it did nothing to alter them. After it was all over the world was a good deal rattled and much shabbier than before, but it was still the same old mean and haphazard world, acquisitive, divided, cantingly patriotic, idiotically prolific, dirty, diseased, spiteful and conceited. It has taken two-score centuries of research and teaching, training, thought and work to make any great alteration in that.

"I admit the outbreak of the World War had a really tremendous air of being an end and a beginning. There were great days in it at first, and for us British as much as for any people. We apprehended the thing in splendid terms. We thought quite honestly--I speak of the common people--that the Imperialisms of Central Europe were wholly wrong and that we were wholly right; hundreds of thousands of us gave ourselves gladly in the sincere belief that a new world was to be won by victory. That spirit was not confined to Britain, nor to either side in this war. I am convinced that the years 1914, 1915 and 1916 saw finer crops of brave and generous deeds and noble sacrifices, of heroic toil and heroic patience, than any years that ever came before in the whole history of mankind or than any of the years that followed for many centuries. The young people were wonderful; death and honour reaped gloriously among them. And then the inherent unsoundness of the issue began to wear through and that false dawn faded out of men's hearts. By the end of 1917 the whole world was a disillusioned world, with but one hope left, the idealism of the United States of America and the still untested greatness of President Wilson. But of that and what it came to, you read about in the history books and I will not talk about it now. A God in that man's position might have unified the world in the twentieth century and saved it centuries of tragic struggle. President Wilson was not a God....

"And I do not think I need tell you very much of the war itself as I saw it. It was a strange phase in human experience and it was described and painted and photographed and put on record very completely. Most of us have read quite a lot about it--except of course Firefly. You know how human life concentrated for four whole years upon the trenches that stretched across Europe on either front of Germany. You know how thousands of miles of land were turned into wildernesses of mud-holes and wire. Nowadays of course nobody reads the books of the generals and admirals and politicians of that time, and all the official war histories sleep the eternal sleep in the vaults of the great libraries, but probably you have all read one or two such human books as Enid Bagnold's _Diary without Dates_ or Cogswell's _Ermytage and the Curate_ or Barbusse's _Le Feu_ or Arthur Green's _Story of a Prisoner of War_ or that curious anthology, _The War Stories of Private Thomas Atkins_, and probably you have seen photographs and films and also pictures painted by such men as Nevinson and Orpen and Muirhead Bone and Will Rothenstein. All of them, I can certify now, are very true books and pictures. They tell of desolation passing like the shadow of an eclipse across the human scene.

"But the mind has the power of reducing and effacing every sort of impression that drags pain with it. I spent great parts out of two years in that noxious, gun-pocked land of haste and hiding, and that time now seems less than many days of my peace-time life. I killed two men with the bayonet in a trench, and it remains as though it was done by someone else and had no significance for me at all. I remember much more clearly that I felt very sick when afterwards I found my sleeve saturated with blood and blood on my hand, and how I tried to get it off by rubbing my arm in the sand because there was no water to be got. In the trenches life was hideously uncomfortable and tedious and while it lasted I was, I know, interminably bored by the drag of the hours, but all those hours are concentrated now into a record of the fact. I remember the shock of the first shell that burst near me and how slowly the smoke and dust unfolded, and how there was a redness in the smoke and how for a time it blotted out the light. That shell burst in a field of yellow-flowering weeds and stubble against the sun, but I do not recall what preceded it nor what followed it; shell-bursts rattled me more and more as the war went on, but they left weaker and weaker pictures.

"One of my most vivid memories of that time is the excitement of my first leave from the front, and how my party arrived at Victoria Station and were guided in a clattering throng to a sort of transport drain called the Underground Railway by elderly volunteers wearing brassards. I was still muddy from the trenches; there had been no time for a wash and a brush-up, and I was carrying my rifle and other gear; we crowded into a brightly lit first-class carriage in which were a number of people in evening dress who were going out to dinner and to the theatre. There could not have been a more vivid contrast if I had seen Firefly there in all her loveliness. There was one young man not much older than myself between two gorgeously dressed women. He had a little white bow under his pink chin and a silk neck-wrap, he had a black cloak with a cape and an opera hat. I suppose he was an invalid but he looked as fit as I. I felt a momentary impulse to say something humiliating to him. I don't think I did. I do not remember that I did. But I looked at him and then at the brown stain on my sleeve and the wonder of life possessed me.

"No--I said nothing. I was in a state of intense exhilaration. The other fellows were gay and inclined to be noisy, one or two were a little drunk, but I was quietly exalted. I seemed to be hearing and seeing and perceiving with such an acuteness as I had never known before. Fanny I should see on the morrow, but that evening I hoped to see Hetty Marcus with whom I was in love. I was in love with her with an intensity that only soldier-boys who had been living in the mud of Flanders for half a year could understand."

§ 2

"How," asked Sarnac, "can I make you see Hetty Marcus, dark-eyed, warm-skinned, wayward and fragile, who brought me to love and death two thousand years ago?

"In a way, she was like Sunray here. She was of her type. She had the same darkness in her eyes, the same still bearing. She was like Sunray's hungry sister. With a touch of fire in her blood.

"Yes--and she had those same stumpy little fingers.... _Look_ at them!

"I met her on those very Downs I used to walk over with my father when I was a boy, to steal the produce from Lord Bramble's gardens. I had a short leave before I was drafted to France and I did not spend it in London with Matilda Good and Fanny as you may think I should have done, but I went with three other youngsters who had enough money to do so, to Cliffstone. I don't know whether I can make it clear to you why I went to Cliffstone. I was excited at the thought of going into the actual warfare, I meant to do brave and wonderful things over there, but also I was terribly overshadowed by the thought that I might be killed. I did not think of wounds or suffering, I do not think I feared those things at all, but I had a profound dread and hatred of extinction before ever I had fully lived, before I had ever tasted many of the most alluring things in life. I had always promised myself love and great adventures with women, and I was passionately distressed at the possibility of being cheated of those intensities. All of us young innocents were in the same case. It was I who had thought of Cliffstone, near to our training camp, with its band and promenade and its flitting glancing girls. There if anywhere, it seemed to me, we must snatch something from life before the great shells splashed us to pieces and the clay of Flanders devoured us. We sneaked off from our families with those fires of protesting romance in our brains and veins.

"You cannot imagine how many millions of lads there were in Europe then, pitifully eager not to miss altogether the secret and magic experiences of love before they died. I cannot tell you of the pothouses and prostitutes that lay in wait for us or of the gaunt moonlight on the beach. I cannot tell you of temptation and ignorance and disease. It is too ugly to tell you; such things are passed and done with, and men suffer them no more. We groped in darkness where now men walk in the light. One of my mates had an ugly misadventure; all had ugly experiences and I escaped by chance rather than any merit of my own from those slovenly snares. I was for a moment fastidious and I recoiled. And I had not drunken as the others had, because some streak of pride in me had made me habitually wary with drink.

"But I was in a storm of excitements and distresses. I was slipping into the pit though I hated it, and to escape it I set myself to revive my memories of the days when I was a boy. I went to Cherry Gardens to see the old home and then to my father's grave--it was neat and pretty with Fanny's money--and then I determined to walk over the Downs to recall, if I could, something of the wonder that I had felt when first I went over them to Chessing Hanger. And also, if you understand me, I felt love and romance would be there. I hadn't abandoned the quest that had brought me to Cliffstone; I had only jumped a foul ditch on my way. When I was a child I had supposed Heaven was over the Downs, and certainly the golden summer sunsets were. It seemed natural to turn my back on Cliffstone and go up into the only really lovely country I had ever known, if I wanted to find romance.

"And I found it.

"I was thrilled but not a bit surprised when I saw Hetty appear over the sky-line of the hill and come right over the brow and stand with her hands behind her back and the sun shining on her hair, looking out across the woods and cornfields to Blythe and the distant marches and the sea. She had taken her hat off and was holding it behind her. She wore an ivory-coloured silk blouse very open at the neck and it was just as though you could see her body through the flimsy stuff.

"She dropped into a sitting position, now looking at her world and now plucking at the little dwarfish flowers in the Downland turf.

"I stood for a time agape at her. Then my whole being was filled with a tremulous resolve to talk to her. My path curved up the slope and carried me over the shoulder of the hill not very far from her. I followed it, stopping ever and again as if to look at the land and sea below, until it brought me as near to her as it could, and then I left it and with a clumsy affectation of carelessness strolled up to the summit until I stood beside her and about six yards away. I pretended not to observe her. I clenched my hands to keep my self-control. She had become aware of me and she was quite motionless now, sitting up and looking at me, but she did not seem in the least dismayed. Your fine face she had, Sunray, and your dark eyes, and I have never known anyone, not even you, who could keep a face so still. Not rigid or hard or staring it was, but quietly, profoundly, still, like a face in some beautiful picture.

"I was all a-tremble, my heart was beating fast but I kept my wits about me.

"'Was there ever a lovelier view?' I said. 'I suppose that bit of blue there that looks like a raft where the water shines, I suppose that is Denge Ness?'

"She did not answer for what seemed a long time. She surveyed me with an unfathomable expression. Then she spoke and as she spoke she smiled. 'You know that is Denge Ness as well as I do.'

"I smiled at her smile. Shy pretences were not for her. I came a step or so nearer with a conversational air. 'I have known this view,' I said, 'since I was a boy of ten. But I did not know anyone else set any value upon it.'

"'Nor I,' she said. 'I came to look at it perhaps for the last time,' she vouchsafed. 'I'm going away.'

"'I'm going away too.'

"'Over there?' she asked, and nodded her head to where the land of France hung like a cloud in the sky.

"'In a week or so.'

"'I'll get to France too. But not so soon as a week or two. But I am going into the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps and I know I shall get over there at last. I join up to-morrow. How can one stay at home with all you boys out there, getting----'

"She was going to say getting '_killed_.' But she caught the word back and finished it with, 'Getting into all sorts of danger and trouble.'

"'One has to go,' I said.

"She looked at me with her head a little on one side. 'Tell me,' she said. 'Do you _want_ to go?'

"'Not a bit. I hate the whole monstrous business. But there's no way out. The Germans have put it on us and we have to go through with it.'

"That was how we all saw it in England during the War. But I won't stop now to argue what really caused a war that ended two thousand years ago. 'The Germans put it on us. I hate going. I wanted to go on with the work I was doing. Now everything is upset.'

"'Everything,' she said and thought for some moments. 'I hate going too,' she said.

"'It drags on week after week, month after month,' I complained. 'The boredom of it! The drills, the salutes, the silly little officers! If only they would take us and raffle us and kill us and have done with it so that we could either die or go home and do something sensible! My life is being wasted. I have been in the machine a year--and I've only got thus far on my way to France! When I see a German soldier at last I shall want to kiss him I shall be so glad. But either I shall kill him or he will kill me--and that will be the end of the story.'

"'And yet one can't keep out of it,' she said.

"'And there is something tremendous about it,' she went on. 'Once or twice I have been up here when there were air-raids. I live quite close here. These air-raids get more and more frequent nowadays. I don't know what they are coming to. You see the searchlights now, every night, waving about like the arms of a drunken man. All over the sky. But before that you hear the pheasants in the woods, clucking and crying. They always hear it first. Other birds take it up. They cry and twitter. And then far away the guns begin rumbling. At first a little sound--"_pud-pud_," then like the whoof of a hoarse dog. And then one gun after another picks it up as the raid comes nearer. Sometimes you can catch the whirr of the engines of the Gothas. There's a great gun behind the farm-house away there and you wait for that and when it fires it hits you on the chest. Hardly anything is to be seen except the searchlights. There's a little flicker in the sky--and star shells. But the guns--riot. It's mad but it's immense. It takes you. Either you are wild with fright or you are wild with excitement. I can't sleep. I walk about my room and long to be out. Twice I've gone out into the night, into the moonlight--with everything a-quiver. Gone for long walks. Once shrapnel fell in our orchard with a hiss like rain. It ripped the bark of the apple trees and tore off twigs and branches and killed a hedge-hog. I found the little wretch in the morning, nearly cut in two. Death hap-hazard! I don't mind the death and the danger so much. But it's the quiver in the world I can't endure. Even in the daytime sometimes, you can't quite hear them, but you can _feel_ the guns, over beyond there....

"'Our old servant,' she said, 'believes it is the end of the world.'

"'For us it may be,' I said.

"She made no answer.

"I looked at her face and my imagination rioted.

"I began to talk with a bare simplicity such as we rarely attained in that shy and entangled age. But my heart was beating fast. 'For years,' I said, 'I have dreamt of the love of a girl. It was to have been the crown of life. I have saved myself up for it. I have had a friend or so, but it wasn't love. And now I am near to going. Out there. It is only a few days before I go over there--to whatever is waiting for me. And when it seems beyond hope I come upon someone.... Don't think me mad, please. Don't think I'm lying. I am in love with you. Indeed I am. You seem altogether beautiful to me. Your voice, your eyes--everything. I could worship you....'

"I couldn't say a word more for a moment or so. I rolled over on the turf and looked her in the face. 'I'm sorry,' I said. 'I'm a silly young Tommy suddenly in love--oh! desperately in love.'

"Her grave face regarded me. She did not look frightened or disconcerted. Perhaps her heart beat faster than I thought. But her voice when she spoke was constrained.

"'Why are you talking like that? You've just met me.... How can you love me? It isn't possible people should love like this.'

"'I've seen you long enough----'

"I could not talk. I met her eyes. Hers dropped before mine. The warm colour mounted to her cheeks. She bit her lips.

"'You,' she said in a low voice, 'are just in love with love.'

"'Anyhow, I am in love,' I said.

"She plucked a spray of minute flowers and forgot it in her hand.

"'This is your last day?' she asked, and made my heart beat faster.

"'It may be my last altogether for this sort of thing. Who can tell? ... For a long time anyhow. Why should it hurt you to let me love you to-day? Why shouldn't you be kind to me? Civil to me--anyhow. I don't ask for so very much. If--suppose--we went for a walk together? Just a long walk. If we spent most of the day together? Somewhere we might get something to eat....'

"She sat considering me gravely.

"'Suppose I did,' she said as if to herself. 'Suppose I did.'

"'What harm could it do you?'

"'What harm could it do?' she repeated with her eyes on mine.

"If I had been older and more experienced I might have known from her warm flushed face and her dark eyes that she too was in love with love that day, and that our encounter was as exciting for her as for me. Suddenly she smiled; she showed herself for an instant as ready as myself. Her constraint had vanished.

"'I'll come,' she decided, and rose with an effortless ease to her feet, and then at my eager movement as I sprang up before her: 'But you'll have to be good, you know. It's just a walk--and a talk.... Why shouldn't we? ... If we keep away from the village.'"

§ 3

"It would seem the queerest story in the world if I told you how we two youngsters spent that day, we who were such strangers that we did not know each other's names and yet who were already drawn so closely together. It was a day of kindly beauty and warmth and we rambled westward until we came to a ridge that dropped steeply to a silvery, tree-bordered canal, and along that ridge we went until we reached a village and a friendly inn, where there were biscuits and cheese and some apples to make a lunch upon. For a time a mood of shyness followed our first avowals, then Hetty talked of her home and of her place in the world. It was only after we had eaten together that we became easy and familiar with each other. It was only as the sun was sinking in the west and our day drew to its golden end that we embraced suddenly as we sat together on a felled tree in a wood, and that I learnt from her what a sweet and wonderful delight the kiss of love may be."

§ 4

Sarnac paused.

"It happened two thousand years ago but it seems to me that it happened just six years from now. Once more I am back in that wood among the long warm shadows of the evening and all my dreams and imaginations awake to reality with Hetty's body in my arms and her lips to mine. I have been able to tell you my story hitherto with a sort of wonder and detachment, as though I showed it you through a telescope. But I have been telling you overmuch perhaps of Fanny and Matilda Good because I have had a sort of reluctance about Hetty. She is still so fresh in my mind that she seems as I name her to come even here and to be living still, a perplexity between Sunray, who is so like her and so unlike her, and myself. I love her again and hate her again as though I was still that assistant editor, that writer of rubbish, in lost and forgotten Thunderstone House in dead old London....

"And I can't describe things now," said Sarnac, "as I have described them up to this. I seem no longer to look back into past things. My memories are living and suffering; they inflame and hurt. I loved Hetty; she was all the delight of love to me. I married her, I divorced her, I repented of the divorce and I was killed for her sake.

"And it seems as if I was killed not a day ago....

"I married while I was in England before I was passed for active service again after my wound. I was wounded in the arm----"

Sarnac stopped and felt his arm. Sunray looked sharply at it and ran her hand down it from shoulder to elbow as if to reassure herself. The others burst into laughter at her manifest anxiety and her expression of relief, the guest-master being particularly delighted.

"I was wounded nevertheless. I was a sitting-up case in the ambulance. I could tell you stories about the nurses and the hospital and how we had a panic about a submarine as we crossed to England.... I married Hetty before I went back because we were now altogether lovers and it was just possible she might have a child. And moreover there was a business about allowances if I got killed that was an added inducement to marry. In those days of haphazard death for the young there was a world-wide fever of love-making and countless such snatched marriages.

"She had never got to France as she had said she hoped to do. For most of the time she was driving a car for the Ministry of Supplies in London. We spent two days of wild endearment, the only honeymoon we could get, at her mother's farm at Payton Links, a little hamlet near Chessing Hanger. (I do not think I have told you that she was the only daughter of a farmer and that Mrs. Marcus, her mother, was a widow.) Hetty had been a clever girl, an elementary school teacher and bookish and enterprising for a country place. She had never mentioned me to her mother until she had written to tell of her approaching marriage.

"When her mother had driven us from the station to the farm and I had helped her to put away the pony, the old lady's non-committal manner relaxed and she said, 'Well, it might have been worse. You've looks and fairish shoulders for one who's town-bred. You can kiss me, my boy, though Smith is a poor exchange for Marcus, and I can't see how anyone can ever expect to get a living for man and wife at a fancy trade like publishing. I'd hoped at first she meant a publican. But publishing she says it is. Whether you're properly old enough for Hetty, Time will show.'

"Time did show very rapidly that I was not properly old enough for Hetty, though I resisted the demonstration with passionate vigour.

"In this world of ours we are by comparison very simple and direct. In that old world we should have seemed shockingly simple and direct. It's not only that they wrapped up and hid their bodies in all sorts of queer garments and wrappings but also that they wrapped up and distorted and hid their minds. And while we to-day have the same simple and clean ideas all over the world about sexual restraints and sexual freedoms, people in those days had the most various and complicated codes, half-hidden and half-confessed. And not merely half-hidden but imperfectly realised, subconscious rather than thought out and settled. Few of these codes respected the freedom of other people or set any bounds to the most extravagant developments of jealousy. And while Hetty's thoughts about love and marriage had been nourished on a diet of country-side folk and then of novels and poetry devoured with avidity and had had tremendous releases in the lax atmosphere of war-time London, I, in spite of my love for and faith in Fanny, had almost unwittingly adopted the rigid standards of my mother. As we used to say in those days, Hetty's was a much more artistic temperament than mine. For my part I did not so much think as assume that the worship of a man for a woman gave place to mastery as soon as her love was won, that the problem of absolute fidelity for both lovers was to be facilitated on his side by an absolute submissiveness on hers. And about her, wherever she went, invisible but real, there had to be a sort of cloistered quality. It was implicit, moreover, that she had never thought of love before she met her predestined and triumphant lover. Ridiculous and impossible you will say! But Sunray here has read the old novels and she can witness that that was the code."

Sunray nodded. "That is the spirit of them," she said.

"Well, in fact, Hetty was not only half a year older than I but ages beyond me in the business of love. She was my teacher. While I had been reading about atoms and Darwin and exploration and socialism, she had been sucking the honey of sensuous passion from hints and half-hints in old romances and poems from Shakespeare and the old playwrights. And not only, I realise now, from books. She took me as one captures and tames an animal and made my senses and my imagination hers. Our honeymoon was magical and wonderful. She delighted in me and made me drunken with delights. And then we parted wonderfully with the taste of her salt tears on my lips, and I went off to the last five months of the War.

"I can see her now, slender as a tall boy in her khaki breeches and driver's uniform, waving to my train as it drew out of Chessing Hanger station.

"She wrote adorable and whimsical love-letters that made me ache to be with her again, and just when we were forcing the great German barrier of the Hindenberg line, came one to tell me we were to have a child. She had not told me of it before, she said, because she had not been quite sure of it. Now she was sure. Would I love her still, now that she would be no longer slim and gracious? Love her still! I was filled with monstrous pride.

"I wrote back to tell her how my job at Thunderstone House was being saved for me, how we would certainly get a little house, a 'dear little house,' in some London suburb, how I would worship and cherish her. Her answer was at once tender and unusual. She said I was too good to her, far too good; she repeated with extraordinary passion that she loved me, had never loved and could never love anyone but me, that she hated my absence more than she could tell, and that I was to do everything I could, move heaven and earth to get my discharge and come home to her and be with her and never, never, never leave her again. She had never wanted my arms about her as she wanted them now. I read nothing between the lines of that outbreak. It seemed just a new mood amidst the variety of her moods.

"Thunderstone House wanted me back as soon as possible, and the War had done much to increase the power and influence of all magazine publishers and newspaper proprietors. I got out of the army within three months of the Armistice and came back to a very soft and tender and submissive Hetty, a new Hetty more wonderful even than the old. She was evidently more passionately in love with me than ever. We took some furnished rooms in a part of London called Richmond, near the Thames and a great park, and we sought vainly for that bright little house in which our child was to be born. But there were no bright little houses available.

"And slowly a dark shadow fell across the first brightness of our reunion. The seasonable days passed but Hetty's child was not born. It was not born indeed until it was nearly two months too late for it to be my child."

§ 5

"We are trained from earliest childhood in the world to be tolerant and understanding of others and to be wary and disciplined with our own wayward impulses, we are given from the first a clear knowledge of our entangled nature. It will be hard for you to understand how harsh and how disingenuous the old world was. You live in a world that is as we used to say 'better bred.' You will find it difficult to imagine the sudden storm of temptation and excitement and forgetfulness in Hetty's newly aroused being that had betrayed her into disloyalty, and still more difficult will you find the tangle of fear and desperate dishonesty that held her silent from any plain speech with me after my return. But had she spoken instead of leaving it to me to suspect, discover and accuse, I doubt if she would have found any more mercy in me for her pitiful and abominable lapse.

"I see now that from the day I returned to Hetty she was trying to tell me of her disaster and failing to find a possible way of doing so. But the vague intimations in her words and manner dropped like seeds into my mind and germinated there. She was passionately excited and made happy by my coming back; our first week together was the happiest week of my old-world life. Fanny came to see us once and we went and had a dinner at her flat, and something had happened to her too, I knew not what, to make her very happy. Fanny liked Hetty. When she kissed me good night after her dinner, she held me and whispered: 'She's a dear. I thought I'd be jealous of your wife, Harry, but I love her.'

"Yes, we were very happy for that week. We walked along together back to our rooms instead of taking a taxi, for it was better for Hetty to walk. A happy week it was that stretched almost to a happy fortnight. And then the shadows of suspicion gathered and deepened.

"It was in bed in the darkness of the night that I was at last moved to speak plainly to Hetty. I woke up and lay awake for a long time, very still and staring at my bleak realisation of what had happened to us. Then I turned over, sat up in bed and said, 'Hetty. This child is not mine.'

"She answered at once. It was plain she too had been awake. She answered in a muffled voice as though her face lay against the pillow. 'No.'

"'You said, no?'

"She stirred, and her voice came clearer.

"'I said no. Oh Husbind-boy I wish I was dead! I wish to God I was dead.'

"I sat still and she said no more. We remained like two fear-stricken creatures in the jungle, motionless, in an immense silence and darkness.

"At last she moved. Her hand crept out towards me, seeking me, and at that advance I recoiled. I seemed to hang for a moment between two courses of action, and then I gave myself over to rage. 'You'd touch me!' I cried, and got out of bed and began to walk about the room.

"'I knew it!' I shouted. 'I knew it! I felt it! And I have loved you! You cheat! You foul thing! You lying cheat!'"

§ 6

"I think I described to you earlier in the story how my family behaved when Fanny left us, how we all seemed to be acting and keeping up a noise of indignation as if we were afraid of some different and disturbing realisations coming through to us should that barrage of make-believe morality fail. And just as my father and my mother behaved in that downstairs kitchen in Cherry Gardens so now I behaved in that desolating crisis between myself and Hetty. I stormed about the room, I hurled insults at her. I would not let the facts that she was a beaten and weeping thing, that she certainly loved me, and that her pain tortured me, prevail against my hard duty to my outraged pride.

"I lit the gas, I don't remember when, and the scene went on in that watery Victorian light. I began dressing, for never more was I to lie in bed with Hetty. I meant to dress and, having said my say, to go out of the house. So I had to be scornful and loudly indignant, but also I had to find my various garments, pull my shirt over my head and lace up my boots. So that there were interludes in the storm, when Hetty could say something that I had to hear.

"'It all happened in an evening,' she said. 'It isn't as though I had planned to betray you. It was his last day before he left and he was wretched. It was the thought of you made me go with him. It was just kindness. There were two of our girls going to have dinner with their boys and they asked me to come and that was how I met him. Officers they were all three, and schoolfellows. Londoners. Three boys who were going over--just as you were. It seemed rotten not to make a party for them.'

"I was struggling with my collar and stud but I tried to achieve sarcasm. 'I see,' I said, 'under the circumstances mere politeness dictated--what you did.... Oh, my God!'

"'Listen how it happened, Harry. Don't shout at me again for a minute. Afterwards he asked me to come to his rooms. He said the others were coming on. He seemed such a harmless sort!'

"'Very!'

"'He seemed the sort who'd surely get killed. And I was sorry for him. He was fair like you. Fairer. And it seemed all different that night. And then he got hold of me and kissed me and I struggled, but I didn't seem to have the strength to resist. I didn't realise somehow.'

"'That's pretty evident. That I can believe.'

"'You've got no pity, Harry. Perhaps it's just. I suppose I ought to have seen the risk. But we aren't all strong like you. Some of us are pulled this way and that. Some of us do the thing we hate. I did what I could. It was like waking-up to realise what had happened. He wanted me to stay with him. I ran out from his rooms. I've never seen him since. He's written but I haven't answered.'

"'He knew you were a soldier's wife.'

"'He's rotten. He knew it. He planned it while we were at dinner. He prayed and promised and lied. He said he wanted just a kiss, just one kiss for kindness. He began with that kiss. I'd been drinking wine, and I'm not used to wine. Oh, Harry! Husbind-boy, if I could have died! But I'd kissed and played about with boys before I met you. It seemed so little--until it was too late.'

"'And here we are!' said I.

"I came and sat down on the bed and stared at Hetty's dishevelled distress. She was suddenly pitiful and pretty. 'I suppose I ought to go and kill this swine,' I said. 'I feel more like killing you.'

"'Kill me,' she said. 'I wish you would.'

"'What's his name? Where is he now?'

"'_He_ doesn't matter a rap,' said Hetty. 'You may hang for me if you like, but you shan't hang for a thing like that. I tell you he doesn't matter. He's a dirty accident. He happened.'

"'You're shielding him.'

"'_Him!_' she said. 'I'm shielding you.'

"I stared at her. Again came a moment when I seemed to hang undecided at the parting of two courses, and again I decided to explode into rage. 'My _God_!' I cried, and then louder and standing up, 'My _God_!' Then I ranted at her. 'I suppose I've only got myself to blame for all this. What did I know of what you were before I met you? I guess I wasn't the first and I guess _he_ won't be the last. What do names matter? I guess you thanked Heaven for a green dud when you met me.' And so on. I paced about the room as I raved.

"She sat up on the bed, her hair disordered and her eyes tearful, regarding me with a still and mournful face. 'Oh, Harry!' she would say ever and again, or 'Oh, Boy!' while I let my clumsy fancy rove through a wilderness of coarse reproaches. Ever and again I would come up to her and stand over her. 'Tell me his name,' I would shout and she would shake her head.

"At last I was dressed. I looked at my watch. 'Five.'

"'What are you going to do?' she asked.

"'I don't know. Go, I suppose. I can't stay here. I should be sick. I shall get most of my things together and go. I'll find a lodging somewhere. It's nearly dawn. I'll go before you need get up. Meanwhile I'll sit in the other room. I can lie on the sofa for a bit.'

"'But the fire's not lit!' she said, 'and it's cold. It's not even laid. And you'll need some coffee!'

"She stared at me with eyes full of solicitude.

"And forthwith she shuffled out of bed and slipped her feet into her bedroom slippers and put on a gay dressing-gown that had been a great delight to us--ten days ago. She went meekly by me, moving her poor heavy body rather wearily, and found some fire-lighters in a cupboard and knelt by the fireplace and began to rake out the ashes of the overnight fire. I made no movement to prevent her. I began to collect together various books and small possessions I intended to take with me.

"She was only apprehending the situation very slowly. She turned to me in the middle of her fire-lighting. 'I suppose you'll leave me a little money to go on with?' she said.

"That gave me a base opportunity. 'I'll leave you money all right,' I sneered. 'I suppose I've got to keep you until we're free. Then it will be his job. Or the next man's.'

"She occupied herself with the fire. She filled a kettle and put it ready. Then she sat down in an arm-chair by the hearth. Her face was white and drawn but she shed no tears. I went to the window and pulled up the blind and stared at the street outside with its street lamps still alight; everything was gaunt and bleak in the colourless cold horror of the earliest dawn.

"'I shall go to mother,' she said, shivering and pulling her dressing-gown about her shoulders. 'It will be dreadful for her to know what has happened. But she's kind. She'll be kinder than anyone.... I shall go to her.'

"'You can do what you like,' I said.

"'Harry!' she said. 'I've never loved any man but you. If I could kill this child---- If it would please you if I killed this child----'

"She spoke with white lips. 'Yes. I tried all I knew. Some things I couldn't bring myself to do. And now it's a thing that's alive....'

"We stared at one another in silence for some moments.

"'No!' I said at last. 'I can't stand it. I can't endure it. Nothing can alter it now. You tell a tale. How do I know? You've cheated once and you can cheat again. You gave yourself to that swine. If I live to a hundred I'll never forgive that. You gave yourself. How do I know you didn't tempt him? You gave. You can go. Go where you gave yourself! They're things no decent man can forgive. Things that are dirty to forgive. He stole you and you let him steal you and he can have you. I wish---- If you'd had the beginnings of a sense of honour you'd never have let me come back to you. To think of these last days here. And you--you with this secret next your heart! The filthiness of it! You--you, whom I've loved.'

"I was weeping."

Sarnac paused and stared into the fire. "Yes," he said, "I was weeping. And the tears I shed--it is wonderful--the tears I shed were tears of the purest self-pity.

"And all the time I saw the thing from my own standpoint alone, blind to the answering tragedy in Hetty's heart. And the most grotesque thing is that all the time she was getting me coffee and that when it was ready I drank her coffee! At the end she wanted to kiss me, to kiss me 'good-bye,' she said, and I rebuffed her and struck her when she came near me. I meant only to thrust her back but my hand clenched at the opportunity. '_Harry!_' she whispered. She stood like a stunned thing watching me go, and then turned suddenly and swiftly and ran back to the bedroom.

"I slammed the outer door and went downstairs into the empty morning Richmond streets; altogether empty of traffic they were, under the flush of dawn.

"I carried my bag towards the railway station that would take me to London; my bag was heavy with the things I had brought away, and it dragged upon my arms, and I felt myself a tragically ill-used but honourably self-vindicated young man."

§ 7

"Oh, poor little things!" cried Starlight. "Oh! poor, little, pitiful pitiless creatures! This story hurts me. I couldn't endure it, if it were anything more than a dream. Why were they all so hard upon each other and so deaf to the sorrow in each other?"

"We knew no better. This world now has a tempered air. In this world we breathe mercy with our first fluttering gasp. We are so taught and trained to think of others that their pain is ours. But two thousand years ago men and women were half-way back to crude Nature. Our motives took us unawares. We breathed infections. Our food was poisoned. Our passions were fevers. We were only beginning to learn the art of being human."

"But didn't Fanny----?" began Firefly.

"Yes," said Willow; "didn't Fanny, who was naturally so wise about love, didn't she take you in hand and send you back to forgive and help your wretched Hetty?"

"Fanny heard my version of our story first," said Sarnac. "She never realised the true values of the business until it was too late to stop the divorce. When I told her that Hetty had lived a life of depravity in London while I was in the trenches, she heard me with amazement but never doubted my word.

"'And she seemed such a dear,' said Fanny. 'She seemed so in love with you. It's wonderful how different women are! There's women who seem to change into something else directly they get out of sight of you round a corner. I _liked_ your Hetty, Harry. There was something sweet about her, be what she may. I never dreamt she'd deceive you and let you down. Fancy!--going about London picking up men! It's just as though she'd done it to me.

"Matilda Good too was wonderfully sympathetic. 'No woman goes wrong only just once,' said Matilda. 'You're right to end it.' The Miltons were giving up her drawing-room floor, I could have it, if I cared to take it. I was only too glad to take it and return to my old home.

"Hetty, I suppose, packed up her own belongings as well as she could. She went down from Richmond to her mother's farm at Payton Links, and there it was her child was born.

"Now I want to tell you," said Sarnac, "what is, I believe, the most remarkable thing in all this story I am telling you. I do not remember in all that time right up to and including our divorce, that I felt any impulse of pity or kindliness, much less of love, towards Hetty. And yet in my dream I was very much the same sort of man as I am to-day. I was a man of the same type. But I was driven by a storm of amazed and outraged pride and sexual jealousy of the most frantic sort towards acts of spite that are almost inconceivable here and now. I was doing all I could to divorce Hetty in such a way as to force her into marriage with Sumner--for that was the man's name--because I had learnt that he was a hopelessly bad character and because I believed he would make her miserable and mar her life altogether. I wanted to do that to punish her, to fill her with bitter regrets for her treatment of me. But at the same time it drove me to the verge of madness to think that he should ever possess her again. If my wishes could have been given creative force, Hetty would have gone to Sumner disfigured and diseased. They would have come together again amidst circumstances of horrible cruelty!"

"Sarnac!" cried Sunray, "that you should even _dream_ such things!"

"Dream! It is as men were. It is as they are, except for the education and the free happiness that release us. For we are not fourscore generations from the Age of Confusion, and that was but a few thousands more from the hairy ape-men who bayed the moon in the primeval forests of Europe. Then it was the Old Man in lust and anger ruled his herd of women and children and begot us all. And in the Age of Confusion after the Great Wars man was, and he still is, the child of that hairy Old Ape-Man. Don't I shave myself daily? And don't we educate and legislate with our utmost skill and science to keep the old beast within bounds? But our schools in the days of Harry Mortimer Smith were still half-way back to the cave; our science was only beginning. We had no sexual education at all, only concealments and repressions. Our code was still the code of jealousy--thinly disguised. The pride and self-respect of a man was still bound up with the animal possession of women--the pride and self-respect of most women was by a sort of reflection bound up with the animal possession of a man. We felt that this possession was the keystone of life. Any failure in this central business involved a monstrous abasement, and against that our poor souls sought blindly for the most extravagant consolations. We hid things, we perverted and misrepresented things, we evaded the issue. Man is a creature which under nearly every sort of stress releases hate and malign action, and we were then still subjected to the extremest stresses.

"But I will not go on apologising for Harry Mortimer Smith. He was what the world made him and so are we. And in my dream I went about that old world, doing my work, controlling my outward behaviour and spending all the force of my wounded love for Hetty in scheming for her misery.

"And one thing in particular was of immense importance to my tormented being. It was that I should get another lover quickly, that I should dispel the magic of Hetty's embraces, lay the haunting ghost of my desire for her. I had to persuade myself that I had never really loved her and replace her in my heart by someone I could persuade myself was my own true love.

"So I sought the company of Milly Kimpton again. We had been close companions before the War, and it was not difficult to persuade myself that I had always been a little in love with her. Always she had been more than a little in love with me. I told her my story of my marriage and she was hurt for my sake and indignant beyond means with the Hetty I presented to her.

"She married me within a week of the completion of my divorce."

§ 8

"Milly was faithful and Milly was kind; she was a cooling refuge from the heat and distresses of my passion. She had a broad, candid face that never looked either angry or miserable; she held her countenance high, smiling towards heaven with a pleasant confidence and self-satisfaction; she was very fair and she was broad-shouldered for a woman. She was tender but not passionate; she was intelligently interested in things but without much whim or humour. She was nearly a year and a half older than I. She had, as people used to say, 'taken a great fancy' to me when first I came into the firm, a crude and inexperienced youngster. She had seen me rise very rapidly to Mr. Cheeseman's position on the editorial staff--he had been transferred to the printing side--and at times she had helped me greatly. We were both popular in Thunderstone House, and when we married there was a farewell dinner to Milly, who gave up her position then in the counting-house; there were speeches and a wonderful wedding-present of dinner-knives and silver forks and spoons in a brass-bound chest of oak with a flattering inscription on a silver plate. There had been a good deal of sympathy with Milly in Thunderstone House, especially among the girls, and a good deal of indignation at me when my first marriage occurred, and my belated recognition of my true destiny was considered a very romantic and satisfactory end to the story.

"We secured a convenient little house in a row of stucco houses all built together to have one architectural effect, called Chester Terrace, close to one of the inner parks of London known as Regent's Park. Milly, I discovered, had a little fortune of nearly two thousand pounds, and so she was able to furnish this house very prettily according to current taste, and in this house in due course she bore me a son. I rejoiced very greatly and conspicuously over this youngster's arrival. I think you will understand how essential it was to my obsession for defeating and obliterating Hetty that Milly should bear me a child.

"I worked very hard during that first year of married life and on the whole I was happy. But it was not a very rich nor a very deep sort of happiness. It was a happiness made up of rather hard and rather superficial satisfactions. In a sense I loved Milly very dearly; her value was above rubies, she was honest and sweet and complaisant. She liked me enormously, she was made happy by my attentions; she helped me, watched for my comfort, rejoiced at the freshness and vigour of my work. Yet we did not talk very freely and easily together. I could not let my mind run on before her; I had to shape what I said to her feelings and standards, and they were very different feelings and standards from my own. She was everything a wife should be except in one matter; she was not for me that particular dear companion for whom the heart of every human being craves, that dear companion with whom you are happy and free and safe. That dear companionship I had met--and I had thrust it from me. Does it come twice in a life to anyone?"

"How should I know?" said Sunray.

"We know better than to reject it," said Radiant.

"Perhaps after many years," said Willow, answering Sarnac's question, "after one has healed and grown and changed."

"Milly and I were close friends indeed, but we were never dear companions. I had told Hetty about my sister Fanny on the evening of our first day together when we walked over the hills, she was instantly sure that she would love Fanny, Fanny had seemed very brave and romantic to Hetty's imagination; but I did not tell Milly of Fanny until close upon our marriage. You will say that it was not Milly's fault that I was shy with her on Fanny's account, but assuredly it was a fault in our relationship. And it was clear that Milly accepted Fanny on my account and refrained from too searching a commentary because of me. Milly believed profoundly in the institution of marriage and in the obligation of an unlimited chastity upon women. 'It is a pity she cannot marry this man,' said Milly, anticipating perplexities. 'It must make everything so inconvenient for her--and everyone who knows her. It must be so difficult to introduce her to people.'

"'You needn't do that,' I said.

"'My people are old-fashioned.'

"'They needn't know,' I said.

"'That would be the easier way for me, Harry.'

"I found my own declarations of affection for Fanny considerably chilled by the effort Milly made to be generous in the matter.

"I found it still more difficult to tell her that Fanny's lover was Newberry.

"'Then is that how you got into Thunderstone House?' asked Milly when at last I got to that revelation.

"'It's how I got my chance there,' I admitted.

"'I didn't think it was like that. I thought you'd made your way in.'

"'I've made my way up. I've never been favoured.'

"'Yes--but---- Do you think people know, Harry? They'd say all sorts of things.'

"You perceive that Milly was not a very clever woman and also that she was very jealous of my honour. 'I don't think anyone knows who matters,' I said. 'Neither I nor Fanny advertise.'

"But it was clear Milly did not like the situation. She would have much preferred a world without sister Fanny. She had no curiosity to see this sister that I loved so dearly or to find any good in her. On various small but quite valid scores she put off going to see her for a whole week. And always I had to remind her of Fanny and speak of Fanny first before Fanny could be talked about. In all other matters Milly was charming and delightful to me, but as far as she could contrive it she banished Fanny from our world. She could not see how much of my affection went also into banishment.

"Their meeting when at last it came about was bright rather than warm. An invisible athermanous screen had fallen not only between Milly and Fanny but between Fanny and myself. Milly had come, resolved to be generous and agreeable in spite of Fanny's disadvantageous status, and I think she was a little disconcerted by Fanny's dress and furniture, for Milly was always very sensitive to furniture and her sensitiveness had been enhanced by our own efforts to equip a delightful home on a sufficient but not too extravagant expenditure. I had always thought Fanny's furnishings very pretty, but it had never occurred to me that they were, as Milly put it, 'dreadfully good.' But there was a red lacquer cabinet that Milly said afterwards might be worth as much as a hundred pounds, and she added one of those sentences that came upon one like an unexpected thread of gossamer upon the face: 'It doesn't seem right somehow.'

"Fanny's simple dress I gathered was far too good also. Simple dresses were the costliest in those days of abundant material and insufficient skill.

"But these were subsequent revelations, and at the time I did not understand why there should be an obscure undertone of resentment in Milly's manner, nor why Fanny was displaying a sort of stiff sweetness quite foreign to my impression of her.

"'It's wonderful to meet you at last,' said Fanny. 'He's talked about you for years. I can remember once long before--long before the War--and everything--at Hampton Court. I can remember sitting on those seats by the river and his talking about you.'

"'I remember that,' I said, though it wasn't the part about Milly that had stuck in my memory.

"'We used to go about together no end in those days,' said Fanny. 'He was the dearest of brothers.'

"'I hope he'll still be,' said Milly very kindly.

"'A son's a son till he gets a wife,' said Fanny, quoting an old-woman's proverb.

"'You mustn't say that,' said Milly. 'I hope you'll come to see us--quite often.'

"'I'd love to come,' said Fanny. 'You're lucky to get a house so easily, these days.'

"'It isn't quite ready yet,' said Milly. 'But as soon as ever it is we must find some day when you are free.'

"'I'm often free,' said Fanny.

"'We'll fix a day,' said Milly, obviously quite resolute to ensure that we had no unexpected calls from Fanny when other people might be about.

"'It's nice you have been in the counting-house and understanding all about his work,' said Fanny.

"'My people didn't like my going into business at all,' said Milly. 'But it's lucky I did.'

"'Lucky for Harry,' said Fanny. 'Are your--people London people?'

"'Dorset,' said Milly. 'They didn't like my coming to London. They're just a little bit churchy and old-fashioned, you know. But it's college or business, I said, and you don't find me staying at home to dust and put out the flowers. One has to take a firm line with one's people at times. Didn't you find that so? There was a convenient aunt in Bedford Park to secure the proprieties and head off the otherwise inevitable latch-key, and it was business instead of college because my best uncle, Uncle Hereward--he's the Vicar of Peddlebourne--objects to the higher education of women. And there was also a question of finance.'

"'It must be interesting for Harry to meet your people,' said Fanny.

"'He's completely conquered Aunt Rachel,' said Milly. 'Though she started hostile. Naturally, as I'm about the only Kimpton of three generations they pitched their expectations high. They'd like me to have a husband with a pedigree a yard long.'

"I felt Milly was rather over-emphasising the county family side of the Kimptons--her father was a veterinary surgeon near Wimborne--but I did not appreciate the qualities in Fanny's bearing and furniture that were putting Milly into this self-assertive mood.

"They went on to talk with a certain flavour of unreality of the hygienic and social advantages of Regent's Park. 'It's easy to get to for one's friends,' said Milly. 'And quite a lot of interesting people, actors and critics and writers and all that sort of people, live round and about there. Of course Harry will want to know more and more of the artistic and literary world now. I expect we'll have to have a Day for them and give them tea and sandwiches. It's a bore, but it's necessary, you know. Harry's got to know people.'

"She smiled at me between pride and patronage.

"'Harry's going up in the world,' said my sister.

"'That's what makes it all so wonderful,' said Milly. 'He's a wonderful brother for you.'

"She began to praise the beauty of Fanny's flat, and Fanny offered to show her all over it. They were away some time and I went to the window, wishing stupidly after the manner of a man that they could somehow contrive to be a little different and a little warmer with each other. Didn't they both love me and shouldn't that be a bond of sisterhood between them?

"Then came tea, one of Fanny's wonderful teas, but I was no longer the indiscriminate devourer of teas that I had been. Milly praised it all like a visiting duchess.

"'Well,' said Milly at last with the air of one who has many appointments, 'it's time to go I'm afraid....'

"I had been watching Fanny very closely throughout this visit and contrasting her guarded and polished civilities with the natural warmth of her reception of Hetty, half a year before. I felt I could not wait for another occasion before I had a word or two with her. So I kissed her good-bye--even her kiss had changed--and she and Milly hesitated and kissed, and I went down past the landing with Milly and heard the door close above. 'I've left my gloves,' I said suddenly. 'You go on down. I won't be a moment.' And I darted back upstairs.

"Fanny did not come to the door immediately.

"'What is it, Harry?' she said, when she appeared.

"'Gloves!' said I. 'No! Here they are in my pocket. Silly of me! ... You _do_ like her, Fanny? You think she's all right, don't you? She's a little shy with you, but she's a dear.'

"Fanny looked at me. I thought her eyes were hard. 'She's all right,' she said. 'Quite all right. You'll never have to divorce _her_, Harry.'

"'I didn't know. I want you to--like her. I thought--you didn't seem quite warm.'

"'Silly old Harry!' said Fanny, with a sudden return to her old manner. And she took me and kissed me like a loving sister again.

"I went down two steps from the door and turned.

"'I'd hate it,' I said, 'if you didn't think she was all right.'

"'She's all right,' said Fanny. 'And it's Good Luck to you, Harry. It's---- You see it's about Good-Bye for me. I shan't be seeing very much of you now with that clever wife of yours to take you about. Who's so _well_-connected. But Good Luck, old Brudder! Oh! _always_ Good Luck!'

"Her eyes were brimming with tears.

"'God send you are happy, Harry dear--after your fashion. It's--it's different....'

"She stopped short. She was weeping.

"She banged her door upon me, and I stood puzzled for a moment and then went down to Milly."

CHAPTER THE SEVENTH

LOVE AND DEATH

§ 1

"In the two years that followed I learnt to love and trust my stiff-spirited wife more and more. She was very brave in a conscious and deliberate way, very clear-headed, very honest. I saw her fight, and it was not an easy fight, to bring our son into the world, and that sort of crisis was a seal between man and woman in those days even as it is to-day. If she never got to any just intuitions about my thoughts and feelings I did presently arrive at a fairly clear sense of hers. I could feel for her ambitions and humiliations. She worked hard to make our home bright and efficient. She had a taste for sound and 'solid' things and temperate harmonies. In that old world, encumbered with possessions and with an extreme household autonomy, servants were a very important matter indeed and she managed ours with just that measured kindliness and just that avoidance of intimacy that was needed by the social traditions of the time. She had always been intelligently interested in the internal politics of Thunderstone House and she showed the keenest desire for my success there. 'I'll see you a director before ten years,' she said. And I worked very hard indeed and not merely for ambition's sake. I really understood and believed in the educational importance of that great slovenly business. Newberry came to recognise in me a response to his own ideas. He would consult me about new schemes and the modification of old procedure. He relied on me more and more and talked with me more and more frequently. And it is a queer thing to recall that by a sort of convention between us we never mentioned or alluded to my sister Fanny in any of our discussions.

"I changed a good deal during my first two and a half years of married life. I matured and hardened. I became a man of the world. I was put up for and elected a member of a good club and developed my gift for talk. I met a widening variety of people, and some of them were quite distinguished people, and I found they did not overawe me. I possessed a gift for caustic commentary that gained me some reputation as a wit, and I felt a growing interest in the showy and sterile game of party politics. My ambitions grew. I was active; I was self-satisfied. I had largely forgotten my intense sexual humiliation. But I was not a very happy man. My life was like a handsome, well-appointed room with a north light; the bowls were full of cut-flowers but the sunlight never came in."

§ 2

"For two years and a half I saw nothing of Hetty and it was not my fault that I ever saw her again. I did everything I could to eradicate her from my existence. I destroyed her photographs and every little vestige of her that might distress me by its memories. If I caught myself in a reverie in which she figured I forced my attention to other things. Sometimes when I made a new success I had a flash of desire that she should witness it. Ugly, I agree, but is it not what we still are--except for civilisation? She came back sometimes in dreams, but they were anger-soaked dreams. And I cultivated my pride and love for Milly. With increasing prosperity Milly's skill in dressing herself developed; she became a very handsome, effective woman; she gave herself to me with a smiling sense of temperate and acceptable giving.

"In those days we had not learnt to analyse our motives. We were much less observant of ourselves than men and women are to-day. I had set my mind upon loving Milly and I did not realise that the essential thing in loving is a thing beyond our wills. Fanny and Hetty I loved by nature and necessity, but my days were now far too completely apportioned between work and Milly for much companionship with Fanny to survive, and Hetty in my heart was like one of those poor shrivelled corpses of offending monks they walled up in the monasteries during the Age of Christendom in Europe. But I found now a curious liveliness in my interest in women in general. I did not ask what these wanderings of attention signified; I was ashamed of them but I gave way to them. Even when I was in Milly's company I would look at other women and find a vague excitement if the intent of my glances was returned.

"And I began to read novels in a new spirit, though I did not know why I was taking to novels; I was reading them, I see now, for the sake of the women I found in them. I do not know, Sunray, whether you realise how much the novels and plays of those days served to give men and women love-phantoms with whom they made imaginative excursions. We successful and respectable ones went our dignified and satisfied ways, assuaging the thin protests of our starved possibilities with such unsubstantial refreshment.

"But it was because of that wandering eye for women that I encountered Hetty again. It was in the springtime that I came upon her, either in March or very early April, in some public gardens quite near to Chester Terrace. These gardens were not in my direct way from the underground railway station, which took me to and fro between home and business and my house, but I was in no hurry for Milly's tea-party and the warmth and sunlight drew me to this place of blossom and budding green. They were what we should call spring gardens nowadays, small but cleverly laid out for display with an abundant use of daffodil, narcissus, hyacinth, almond-blossom and the like, with hard paths and seats placed to command happy patches of colour. On one of these seats a woman was sitting alone with her back to me looking at a patch of scyllas. I was struck by the loveliness of her careless pose. Such discoveries of the dear beauty that hides in the world would stir me like a challenge and then stab me with pain. She was dressed very poorly and simply, but her dingy clothing was no mor than the smoked glass, one uses to see the brightness of the sun.

"I slackened my pace as I went past and glanced back to see her face. And I saw the still face of Hetty, very grave and sorrowful, Hetty, no longer a girl but a woman, looking at the flowers and quite unheedful of my regard.

"Something greater than pride or jealousy seized me then. I went a few steps farther and stopped and turned, as though no other thing was possible.

"At that she became aware of me. She looked up, doubted, and recognised me.

"She watched me with that motionless face of hers as I came and sat down beside her. I spoke in a voice of astonishment on the edge of a storm of emotion. 'Hetty,' I said, 'I couldn't go past you!'

"She did not answer immediately. 'Are you---?' she began and stopped. 'I suppose we were bound to meet again,' she said, 'sooner or later. You look as if you had grown, Harry. You look well and prosperous.'

"'Do you live in this part of London?' I asked.

"'Camden Town just now,' she said. 'We move about.'

"'You married--Sumner?'

"'What did you expect me to do? What else was there to do? I've drunk my cup to the dregs, Harry.'

"'But---- You had the child?'

"'It died--it died all right. Poor little mite. And my mother died a year ago.'

"'Well, you've got Sumner.'

"'I've got Sumner.'

"At any time before that meeting I should have exulted over the death of Sumner's child, but in the presence of Hetty's misery that old hatred would not come back for its gratification. I was looking at her face which was so familiar and so changed, and it was as if I woke up again to love for her after two years and a half of insensibility. What a beaten and unhappy thing she was--she whom I had loved and hated so bitterly.

"'It seems a long way back now to Kent, Harry--and mother's farm,' she said.

"'You've parted with it?'

"'Farm and furniture--and mostly it's gone. Sumner bets. He's betted most of it away. It's hard, you see, to find a job but easy to fancy a winner. Which doesn't win....'

"'My father used to do that,' I said. 'I'd like to shoot every race-horse in England.'

"'I hated selling the farm,' she said. 'I sold the farm and came into this dingy old London. Sumner dragged me here and he's dragging me down. It's not his fault; it's how he's made. But when a spring day comes like this----! I think of Kent and the winds on the Downs and the blackthorn in the hedges and the little yellow noses of the primroses and the first elder leaves coming out, until I want to cry and scream. But there's no getting out of it. Here I am. I've come to look at these flowers here. What's the good? They just hurt me.'

"She stared at the flowers.

"'My God!' I said, 'but this hurts me too. I didn't expect----'

"'What did you expect?' she asked, and turned that still face of hers to me and silenced me.

"'I don't see that it should hurt you,' she said. 'I brought it on myself. You didn't do it. It happened to me. It was my fault. Though why God made me love beautiful things--and then set a trap for me and made me fool enough to fall into it----!'

"Silence fell between us.

"'Meeting you like this,' I began presently, 'makes me see things--so differently. You see--in those old days--in some ways you seemed so much stronger than I was. I didn't understand.... I see---- This makes me feel---- I ought to have taken better care of you."

"'Or shown me mercy. I was dirty and shameful--yes. All that. But you were merciless, Harry. Men are merciless to women. I did--all through--I loved you, Harry. In a way I've always loved you and I love you now. When I looked up and saw it was you coming back to me---- For a minute you were just like the old Harry. For a moment---- It was like Spring coming real.... But it's no good talking like that now, Harry. It's too late.'

"'Yes,' I agreed. 'Too late....'

"She watched my face through a long pause. I weighed my words when I spoke. 'Up to now,' I said, 'I've never forgiven. Now---- Now I see you here I wish--I wish to God--I had forgiven you. And made a fight for it with you. We might---- Suppose, Hetty, suppose I had forgiven you----?'

"'Harry dear,' she said softly, 'you don't want to be seen here making a woman cry. We won't talk of that. Tell me about yourself. I've heard you married again. A beautiful woman. Sumner saw that I heard of that. Are you happy, Harry? You look prosperous, and everyone isn't prosperous these post-war times.'

"'That's all so-and-so, Hetty. I work hard. I've got ambitions. I'm still a publisher's assistant at the old place but I'm near to being a director. I'm high up. My wife---- She's a dear and a great help to me.... Somehow meeting you ... My God! Hetty, what a mess we made of things! It's all very well, but the second time of marrying isn't like the first. You and I---- I'm a sort of blood brother to you and nothing can change it. The wood--that little wood where you kissed me! Why did we smash it up, Hetty? Why did we do it? Two fools who'd got so precious a thing! That's all past. But hate is dead between us. That's past too. If there was anything I could do for you now I would do it.'

"A gleam of the old humour came, 'If you could kill Sumner,' she said, 'and smash the world and destroy the memories of three years ... It's no good, Harry. I ought to have kept myself clean. And you--you might have been gentler with me.'

"'I couldn't, Hetty.'

"'I knew you couldn't. And I couldn't foresee that my blood would betray me one evening. And here we are! Like meeting after we are dead. Spring comes now but it comes for other people. All these little crocus trumpets--like a brass band it is--they are trumpeting up the next lot of lovers. Better luck to them!'

"We sat still for a time. In the background of my mind Milly and her assembled tea-cups became evident as a faint urgency. 'You're late,' she'd say.

"'Where are you living, Hetty?' I asked. 'What is your address?'

"She shook her head after a moment's thought. 'Better you shouldn't know.'

"'But somehow I might help.'

"'It would only disturb us all. I've got my cup--of dirty water--to drink. I've got to stand what I'm in for. What could you do to help me?'

"'Well,' said I, 'my address anyhow is easy to keep in mind. It's just what it was when we---- In the days when we lived---- Thunderstone House it is. Some day there might be something----'

"'It's good of you.'

"We stood up face to face, and as we stood there a thousand circumstances vanished and nothing remained but our hurt and injured selves. 'Good-bye, Hetty,' I said. 'Good luck.'

"Our hands met. 'Good luck to you, Harry. It's no good, but I'm glad we met like this. And to find you forgive me a little at last.'"

§ 3

"That meeting had a profound effect upon me. It banished much aimless reverie from my mind; it unlocked the prison in which a whole multitude of forbidden thoughts had been confined. I thought enormously of Hetty. They were vague and impossible thoughts; they came in the night, on the way to business, even during slack moments in business hours; rehearsals of dramatised encounters, explanations, magic turns of circumstances that suddenly restored our lost world to us. I tried to suppress these cloudy imaginations but with little avail; they overspread my mental skies in spite of me. I can't tell you how many times I walked through those gardens in Regent's Park; that detour became my normal route from the station to my home. And I would even go out of my customary way along some side-path because I had caught a glimpse far off, between the tree-branches and the flower-beds, of a solitary woman. But Hetty never came back there.

"In my brooding over Hetty a jealousy and hatred of Sumner developed steadily. I do not think I had any desire for Hetty myself but I wanted intensely to get her away from him. This hostility to Sumner was the ugly undertow of my remorse and re-awakened love of Hetty. He was the evil thing that had deprived me of Hetty. I did not reflect for a moment that it was I with my relentless insistence upon divorce that had forced her back to him.

"And all this dreaming and brooding and futile planning, all this body of desire for something more to happen between Hetty and myself, went on without my breathing a word of it to any living soul. It was on my conscience that it was disloyal to Milly, and I even made a half-hearted attempt to tell Milly that I had met Hetty and been shocked at her poverty and unhappiness. I wanted to bring her into my own state of mind and have her feel as I did. I threw out a remark one day--we had gone to Hampstead Heath for a walk one afternoon--that I had once walked along that ridge by the Round Pond with Hetty during my last leave. 'I wonder how she is living now,' I said.

"Milly did not answer immediately, and when I looked at her her face was flushed and hard. 'I hoped you had forgotten her,' she said in a suffocated voice.

"'This brought it back to me.'

"'I try never to think of her. You don't know what that woman meant to me--the humiliation.

"'It was not only for myself,' she added. 'It was for you.'

"She said no more but it was manifest how terribly the mere name of Hetty had disturbed her."

"Poor little things!" cried Firefly. "How insanely jealous you all were!"

"And I did not go to Fanny and tell her about Hetty for a time. I had misrepresented Hetty to her as a figure of common depravity and I found it difficult to put that right. Nowadays I did not see so much of Fanny as I had formerly done. She was living half-way across London from me. Her relations with Newberry were now much more public than they had been and she had developed a circle of acquaintances who cared for her. But this publicity made Milly more stiff towards her because she feared that a scandal would be made about Fanny in relation to my position in the firm of Crane & Newberry. Near Pangbourne, Newberry had taken a bungalow and there Fanny would spend whole weeks at a time, quite out of our range.

"But presently a situation developed which sent me post-haste to Fanny for help and advice."

§ 4

"Suddenly in July, when I was beginning to think I should never hear from her again, Hetty appealed to me for help. Would I meet her one evening, she asked, by the fountain in the park near the Zoological Gardens, and then we could get chairs and she would tell me what she had in mind. She did not want me to write her a letter, Sumner had become very jealous of her, and so would I put an advertisement in the _Daily Express_ with the letters A B C D and giving the hour and date. I made an appointment for the earliest possible evening.

"Instead of the despondent and spiritless Hetty I had met in the spring I found a Hetty high strung and excited. 'I want some place where we shan't be seen,' she said as I came up to her. She took my arm to turn me about, and led the way towards two green chairs standing apart a little away from the main walk that here traversed the park. I noted that she was still wearing the same shabby dress she had had on our previous encounter. Her manner with me was quite different from the manner of our former meeting. There was something familiar and confident about her as though in between she had met me in imagination a multitude of times--as no doubt she had.

"'You meant all you said, Harry, when we talked before?' she began.

"'Everything.'

"'You will help me if you can?'

"'Everything I can.'

"'Suppose I asked you for some money?'

"'Naturally.'

"'I want to get away from Sumner. I have a chance. I could do it.'

"'Tell me about it, Hetty. All I can do, I will.'

"'Things have changed, Harry, since that day we met. I'd got into a sort of despairing state. I took whatever came. Seeing you changed me. I don't know why but it did. Perhaps I was going to change anyhow. But I can't stand being with Sumner any longer. And there's a chance now. I shall want a lot of money--sixty or seventy pounds.'

"I thought. 'That's quite possible, Hetty. If you can wait a week or so. Ten days say.'

"'You see I have a friend, a girl who married a Canadian. She stayed here to have her child when he went home and now she goes out to him. She's been ill; she's not very strong and she doesn't want to face the voyage alone. It would be easy for me to get out there with her as her cousin and companion. If I had an outfit---- We've discussed it all. She knows someone who could manage about a passport for me. In my maiden name. That's the scheme. I could have my outfit sent to her place. I could slip away.'

"'You'd take another name? Begin again over there?'

"'Yes....'

"I sat considering this project. It pleased me. 'There need be no trouble about the money,' I said.

"'I can't go on living with Sumner. You never saw him. You don't know what he's like.'

"'I've heard he was good looking.'

"'Don't I know that face--flushed and weak! He's a liar and a cheat. He has a conceit he can best everyone. And he's begun drinking. God knows why I married him. It seemed the natural thing somehow since you had divorced me. The child had to have a father.... But he disgusts me, Harry. He disgusts me. I can't go on. I can't endure it. You can't imagine it--in those little lodgings--in the hot weather. To keep a maudlin drunken man away from one.... If I hadn't seen this way out something worse might have happened.'

"'Can't you come away from him at once?' I asked. 'Why should you ever go back to him?'

"'No. I must get clear away or there will be mischief. And you mustn't be in it. He'd think of you at once. If he had a hint it was you. That's what you have to do about the money and everything, letters or anything--get it to me without your being mixed up with it. You must get me money, not cheques. We mustn't be seen to meet. Even about here it's risky. He's got into a gang. He's been getting deeper and deeper into a rotten set. They blackmail the bookies. They go about with revolvers. They pass on things to one another. It grew out of betting and now they call it getting a bit of their own back.... If they spot you in it, they'll come for you.'

"'Trench warfare in London. I'll risk it.'

"'You needn't risk anything--if we are discreet. If there was some one I could see--who'd hand things on.'

"I thought at once of my sister Fanny.

"'That would be safe,' said Hetty. 'As safe as could be. And I'd love to see her again. I loved her when I met her.... But all this is awful good of you, Harry. I don't deserve a moment's kindness.

"'Nonsense! I pushed you into the dirt, Hetty.'

"'I jumped into it.'

"'Fell into it. It's nothing very much, Hetty, to give you a hand to get out of it again.'"

§ 5

"I went the next day to my sister Fanny to prepare her for Hetty's call. Fanny sat in an arm-chair and listened and watched my face as I told my story, confessed how I had exaggerated Hetty's offence and asked for help. 'I ought to have seen her, Harry, before I took your word for it,' she said. 'Of course, even now, I can't imagine how a girl who loves one man could ever stand the kiss of another as she did, but then, as you say, she'd been drinking. We women aren't all made alike. There's all sorts make a world. Some girls--the backbone goes out of them when they feel a man's kisses. You and me, Harry, we aren't made like that. I've been thinking while you sat talking there, how like we both are to poor mother really--for all she quarrelled with me. We'll grow hard presently if we aren't careful. And your Hetty was young and she didn't know. Only once it was. And all her life's been spoilt by it! ... I didn't know it was like that, Harry.'

"And my sister Fanny began to recall her impressions of Hetty. She recalled her fine animation and the living interest of her talk. 'When she left I said to myself, she's got wit; that's the first witty woman I've ever met. She's got poetry in her. Everything she says comes out a little different from the things most people say. She says things that come like flowers in a hedgerow. So she did. Does she still?"

"'I never thought of it like that before,' I said. 'I suppose she has a sort of poetry. Only the other day--when I met her first. What was it she said? Something.'

"'It's no good quoting, Harry. Witty things should bloom where they grow. They're no good as cut-flowers. But you and I are fairly quick and fairly clever, Harry, but we've never had any of that.'

"'I've always loved her talk,' I said.

"I began to explain the situation to Fanny more fully and to show how she could help in it. I was not to see Hetty again; Fanny was to see her, pay her the hundred pounds we could put together for her, communicate with the friends she was to accompany and get her away. Fanny listened gravely and agreed.

"Then she reflected.

"'Why don't you take her to Canada yourself, Harry?' she asked abruptly."

§ 6

"I did not answer Fanny for some moments. Then I said, 'I don't want to.'

"'I can see you love Hetty still.'

"'Love. But I don't want that.'

"'You don't want to be with her?'

"'It's out of the question. Why ask a painful thing like that? All that is dead.'

"'Isn't a resurrection possible? Why is it out of the question? Pride?'

"'No.'

"'Why then?'

"'Milly.'

"'You don't love Milly.'

"'I won't have you discuss that, Fanny. I do love her.'

"'Not as you love Hetty.'

"'Quite differently. But Milly trusts me. She keeps faith with me. I'd as soon steal money--from a child's money-box--as go back on Milly.'

"'It's wonderful how fine men can be to the wives they don't love,' said Fanny bitterly.

"'Newberry's different,' I said. 'I've got my little son. I've got my work. And though you will never have it, I love Milly.'

"'In a way. Is she company for you? Is she fun?'

"'I trust and love her. And as for Hetty, you don't understand about Hetty. I love her. I love her enormously. But it's like two ghosts meeting by moonlight. We two are dead to each other and--sorrowful. It isn't as though it was anything like your case over again. I see Hetty in hell and I'd do nearly anything in life to get her out. I don't even want to meet her. I want to get her away out of this filth and stupidity to where she can begin again. That's all I want and that's all she wants. How could she and I ever come together again? How could we kiss again as lovers kiss? Poor defiled things we are! And all my cruelty. You're thinking of something else, Fanny. You're not thinking of Hetty and me.'

"'Maybe I am,' said Fanny. 'Yes, I think I am. And so she is to go to Canada and begin again--till her health comes back and her courage comes back. It isn't natural for a woman of her temperament to live without a man to love her, Harry.'

"'Let her live and love,' said I. 'She'll have changed her name. Her friends will stand by her. They won't give her away. Let her forget. Let her begin again.'

"'With another man?'

"'It may be.'

"'You don't mind the thought of that?'

"I was stung but I kept my temper. 'Have I any right to mind the thought of that now?'

"'But you will. And you will go on living with this wife you trust and respect. Who's dull spirited--dull as ditchwater.'

"'No. Who's my son's mother. Who is trustworthy. Whom I'm pledged to. And I've got my work. It may seem nothing to you. It's good enough for me to give myself to it. Can't I love Hetty, can't I help her out of the net she's in, and yet not want to go back to impossible things?'

"'Grey Monday mornings,' said Fanny.

"'As if all life wasn't grey,' I said.

"And then," said Sarnac, "I remember that I made a prophecy. I made it--when did I make it? Two thousand years ago? Or two weeks ago? I sat in Fanny's little sitting-room, an old-world creature amidst her old-world furnishings, and I said that men and women would not always suffer as we were suffering then. I said that we were still poor savages, living only in the bleak dawn of civilisation, and that we suffered because we were under-bred, under-trained and darkly ignorant of ourselves, that the mere fact that we knew our own unhappiness was the promise of better things and that a day would come when charity and understanding would light the world so that men and women would no longer hurt themselves and one another as they were doing now everywhere, universally, in law and in restriction and in jealousy and in hate, all round and about the earth.

"'It is still too dark for us,' I said, 'to see clearly where we are going, and everyone of us blunders and stumbles and does wrong. Everyone. It is idle for me to ask now what is the right thing for me to do? Whatever I do now will be wrong. I ought to go with Hetty and be her lover again--easily I could do that and why should I deny it?--and I ought to stick to Milly and the work I have found in the world. Right road or left road, both lead to sorrow and remorse, but there is scarcely a soul in all this dark world, Fanny, who has not had to make or who will not presently have to make a choice as hard. I will not pull the skies down upon Milly, I _cannot_ because she has put her faith in me. You are my dear sister Fanny and I love you and we have loved each other. Do you remember how you used to take me round to school and hold my hand at the crossings? Don't make things too hard for me now. Just help me to help Hetty. Don't tear me to pieces. She is still alive and young and--Hetty. Out there--she at least can begin again.'"

§ 7

"Nevertheless, I did see Hetty again before she left England. There came a letter for me at Thunderstone House in which she proposed a meeting.

"'You have been so kind to me,' she wrote. 'It is the next best thing to your never having left me. You have been a generous dear. You've given back happiness to me. I feel excited already at the thought of the great liner and the ocean and full of hope. We've got a sort of picture of the ship; it is like a great hotel; with our cabin marked in it exactly where it is. Canada will be wonderful; Our Lady of the Snows; and we are going by way of New York, New York, like nothing else on earth, cliffs and crags of windows, towering up to the sky. And it's wonderful to have new things again. I sneak off to Fanny's just to finger them over. I'm excited--yes, and grateful--yes, and full of hope--yes. And Harry, Harry, my heart aches and aches. I want to see you again. I don't deserve to but I want to see you again. We began with a walk and why shouldn't we end with a walk? Thursday and Friday all the gang will be at Leeds. I could get away the whole day either day and it would be a miracle if anyone knew. I wish we could have that same old walk again. I suppose it's too far and impossible. We'll save that, Harry, until we're both quite dead and then we'll be two little swirls of breeze in the grass or two bits of thistledown going side by side. But there was that other walk we had when we went to Shere and right over the North Downs to Leatherhead. We looked across the Weald and saw our own South Downs far, far away. Pinewood and heather there was; hills beyond hills. And the smoke of rubbish-burning.'

"I was to write to Fanny's address.

"Of course we had that walk, we two half-resuscitated lovers. We did not make love at all though we kissed when we met and meant to kiss when we parted. We talked as I suppose dead souls might talk of the world that had once been real. We talked of a hundred different things--even of Sumner. Now that she was so near escape from him her dread and hatred had evaporated. She said Sumner had a passionate desire for her and a real need of her and that it was not fair to him and very bad for him that she despised him. It wounded his self-respect. It made him violent and defiant. A woman who cared for him, who would take the pains to watch him and care for him as a woman should do for a man, might have made something of him. 'But I've never cared for him, Harry; though I've tried. But I can see where things hurt him. I can see they hurt him frightfully at times. It doesn't hurt him any the less because he does ugly things.' He was vain, too, and ashamed of his incapacity to get a sufficient living. He was drifting very rapidly to a criminal life and she had no power over him to hold him back.

"I can still see Hetty and hear her voice, as we walked along a broad bridle-path between great rhododendron bushes, and she talked, grave and balanced and kind she was, of this rogue who had cheated her and outraged her and beaten her. It was a new aspect of Hetty and yet at the same time it was the old dear Hetty I had loved and wasted and lost, clear-minded and swift, with an understanding better than her will.

"We sat for a long time on the crest of the Downs above Shere where the view was at its widest and best, and we recalled the old days of happiness in Kent and talked of the distances before us and of crossing the sea and of France and so of the whole wide world. 'I feel,' she said, 'as I used to when I was a child, at the end of the school quarter. I'm going away to new things. Put on your frock, put on your hat; the big ship is waiting. I am a little frightened about it and rather happy.... I wish---- But never mind that.'

"'You wish----?'

"'What else could I wish?'

"'You mean----?'

"'It's no good wishing."

"'I've got to stick to the job I've taken. I've got to see it through. But if you care to know it, Hetty, I wish so too. My God!--if wishes could release one!'

"'You've got your job here. I wouldn't take you away, Harry, if I could. Sturdy you are, Harry, and you'll go through with it and do the work you're made to do--and I'll take what comes to me. Over there I guess I'll forget a lot about Sumner and the things that have happened in between--and think a lot about you and the South Downs and this--how we sat side by side here.

"'Perhaps,' said Hetty, 'heaven is a place like this. A great hillside to which you come at last, after all the tugging and pushing and the hoping and the disappointments and the spurring and the hungers and the cruel jealousies are done with and finished for ever. Then here you sit down and rest. And you aren't alone. Your lover is here and he sits beside you and you just touch shoulder to shoulder, very close and very still, and your sins are forgiven you; your blunders and misunderstandings they matter no longer; and the beauty takes you and you dissolve into it, you dissolve into it side by side and together you forget and fade until at last nothing remains of all the distresses and anger and sorrow, nothing remains of you at all but the breeze upon the great hillside and sunshine and everlasting peace....

"'All of which,' said Hetty, rising abruptly to her feet and standing over me, 'is just empty nothingness. Oh Harry! Harry! One feels things and when one tries to say them it is just words and nonsense. We've hardly started on our way to Leatherhead and you'll have to be back by seven. So get up, old Harry. Get up and come on. You are the dearest person alive and it has been sweet of you to come with me to-day. I was half-afraid you'd think it wasn't wise....'

"In the late afternoon we got to a place called Little Bookham and there we had tea. About a mile farther on was a railway station and we found a train for London; it came in as we got on to the platform.

"Everything had gone well so far and then came the first gleam of disaster. At Leatherhead we sat looking out on the station platform and a little ruddy man came trotting along to get into the compartment next to us, a little common fellow like an ostler with a cigar under his Hebrew nose, and as he was about to get in he glanced up at us. Doubt and then recognition came into his eyes and at the sight of him Hetty recoiled.

"'Get in,' said the guard, blowing his whistle, and the little man was hustled out of sight.

"Hetty was very white. 'I know that man,' she said, 'and he knows me. He's named Barnado. What shall I do?'

"'Nothing. Does he know you very well?'

"'He's been to our rooms--three or four times.'

"'He may not have been sure it was you.'

"'I think he was. Suppose he were to come to the window at the next station to make certain. Could I pretend not to be myself? Refuse to recognise him or answer to my name?'

"'But if he was convinced it was you in spite of your bluff that would instantly make him suspicious and off he'd go to your husband! If on the other hand you took it all quite casually--said I was your cousin or your brother-in-law--he might think nothing of it and never even mention it to Sumner. But making him suspicious would send him off to Sumner right away. Anyhow, you go to Liverpool to-morrow. I don't see that his recognition of you matters.'

"'I'm thinking of you,' she said.

"'But he doesn't know who I am. So far as I know none of that lot has seen me....'

"The train slowed down at the next station. Mr. Barnado appeared, cigar and all, bright-eyed and curious.

"'Blest if I didn't say to myself that's Hetty Sumner!' said Mr. Barnado. 'Wonderful 'ow one meets people!'

"'My brother-in-law, Mr. Dyson,' said Hetty, introducing me. 'We've been down to see his little daughter.'

"'I didn't know you 'ad a sister, Mrs. Sumner.'

"'I haven't,' said Hetty, with a note of pain in her voice. 'Mr. Dyson is a widower.'

"'Sorry,' said Mr. Barnado. 'Stupid of me. And what age might the little girl be, Mr. Dyson?'

"I found myself under the necessity of creating, explaining and discussing an orphan daughter. Mr. Barnado had three and was uncomfortably expert about children and their phases of development. He was evidently a model father. I did as well as I could, I drew out Mr. Barnado's family pride rather than indulged my own, but I was immensely relieved when Mr. Barnado exclaimed, 'Gawd! 'Ere's Epsom already! Glad to 'ave met you, Mr.----'

"'Damn!' I said to myself. I had forgotten.

"'Dixon,' said Hetty hastily, and Mr. Barnado, after effusive farewells, proceeded to remove himself from the carriage.

"'Thank Heaven!' said Hetty, 'he didn't come on to London. You're the poorest liar, Harry, I've ever known. As it is--no harm's been done.'

"'No harm's been done,' said I, but two or three times before we reached the London station where we were to part for ever, we recurred to the encounter and repeated the reassuring formula that no harm had been done.

"We parted at Victoria Station with very little emotion. Mr. Barnado had brought us back, as it were, to an everyday and incidental atmosphere. We did not kiss each other again. The world about us had become full now of observant eyes. My last words to Hetty were 'Everything's all right!' in a business-like, reassuring tone, and the next day she slipped off to join her friends at Liverpool and passed out of my life for ever."

§ 8

"For three or four days I did not feel this second separation from Hetty very greatly. My mind was still busy with the details of her departure. On the third day she sent me a wireless message, as we used to call it, to Thunderstone House. 'Well away,' she said. 'Fine weather. Endless love and gratitude.' Then slowly as the days passed my sense of loss grew upon me, the intimations of an immense loneliness gathered and spread until they became a cloud that darkened all my mental sky. I was persuaded now that there was no human being who could make me altogether happy but Hetty, and that for the second time I was rejecting the possibility of companionship with her. I had wanted love, I perceived, without sacrifice, and in that old world, it seems to me now, love was only possible at an exorbitant price, sacrifice of honour, sacrifice of one's proper work in the world, humiliations and distresses. I had shirked the price of Hetty and she was going from me, taking out of my life for ever all those sweet untellable things that were the essence of love, the little names, the trivial careless caresses, the exquisite gestures of mind and body, the moments of laughter and pride and perfect understanding. Day by day love went westward from me. Day and night I was haunted by a more and more vivid realisation of a great steamship, throbbing and heaving its way across the crests and swelling waves of the Atlantic welter. The rolling black coal-smoke from its towering funnels poured before the wind. Now I would see that big ocean-going fabric in the daylight; now lit brightly from stem to stern, under the stars.

"I was full of unappeasable regret, I indulged in endless reveries of a flight across the Atlantic in pursuit of Hetty, of a sudden dramatic appearance before her;--'Hetty, I can't stand it. I've come'--and all the time I stuck steadfastly to the course I had chosen. I worked hard and late at Thunderstone House; I did my best to shunt my imagination into new channels by planning two new quasi-educational publications, and I set myself to take Milly out to restaurants to dinner and to the theatre and to interesting shows. And in the midst of some picture-show perhaps I would find my rebel mind speculating what sort of thing Hetty would have said of it, had she been there. There was a little show of landscapes at the Alpine Gallery and several were pictures of Downland scenery and one showed a sunlit hillside under drowsy white clouds. It was almost like seeing Hetty.

"It was exactly a week after Hetty's landing in New York that I first encountered Sumner. It was my usual time of arrival and I was just turning out of Tottenham Court Road into the side street that led to the yard of Thunderstone House. There was a small public-house in this byway and two men were standing outside it in attitudes of expectation. One of them stepped out to accost me. He was a little flushed Jewish man, and for the moment I did not recognise him at all.

"'Mr. Smith?' said he, and scrutinised me queerly.

"'At your service,' said I.

"'Not by any chance Mr. Dyson or Dixon, eh?' he asked with a leer.

"'Barnado!' cried my memory and placed him. My instant recognition must have betrayed itself in my face. Our eyes met and there were no secrets between them. 'No, Mr. Barnado,' I said with incredible stupidity; 'my name's just plain Smith.'

"'Don't mention it, Mr. Smith, don't mention it,' said Mr. Barnado with extreme politeness. 'I had a sort of fancy I might have met you before.' And turning to his companion and raising his voice a little, he said, 'That's him all right, Sumner--sure as eggs are eggs.'

"Sumner! I glanced at this man who had given my life so disastrous a turn. He was very much my own height and build, fair with a blotched complexion and wearing a checked grey suit and an experienced-looking grey felt hat. He might have been my unsuccessful half-brother. Our eyes met in curiosity and antagonism. 'I'm afraid I'm not the man you want,' I said to Barnado and went on my way. I didn't see any advantage in an immediate discussion in that place. I perceived that an encounter was inevitable, but I meant it to happen amidst circumstances of my own choice and after I had had time to consider the situation properly. I heard something happen behind me and Barnado said: 'Shut up, you fool! You've found out what you want to know.' I went through the passages and rooms of Thunderstone House to my office and there, when I was alone, I sat down in my arm-chair and swore very heartily. Every day since the departure of Hetty I had been feeling more and more sure that this at least was not going to happen. I had thought that Sumner was very easily and safely and completely out of the story.

"I took my writing-pad and began to sketch out the situation. '_Ends to be secured,_' I wrote.

"'_No. 1. Hetty must not be traced._

"'_No. 2. Milly must hear nothing of this._

"'_No. 3. No blackmailing._'

"I considered. '_But if a lump payment,_' I began. This I scratched out again.

"I had to scheme out the essential facts. '_What does S. know? What evidence exists? Of what? No clue to lead to Fanny? There is nothing but that journey in the train. He will have a moral certainty but will it convince anyone else?_'

"I wrote a new heading: '_How to handle them?_'

"I began to sketch grotesques and arabesques over my paper as I plotted. Finally I tore it up into very small fragments and dropped it into my wastepaper basket. A messenger-girl rapped and came in with a paper slip, bearing the names of Fred Sumner and Arthur Barnado.

"'They've not put the business they want to talk about,' I remarked.

"'They said you'd know, Sir.'

"'No excuse. I want everybody to fill in that,' I said. 'Just say I'm too busy to see strangers who don't state their business. And ask them to complete the form.'

"Back came the form: 'Enquiry about Mr. Sumner's missing wife.'

"I considered it calmly. 'I don't believe we ever had the manuscript. Say I'm engaged up to half-past twelve. Then I could have a talk of ten minutes with Mr. Sumner alone. Make that clear. I don't see where Mr. Barnado comes in. Make it clear it's a privilege to see me.'

"My messenger did not reappear. I resumed my meditations on the situation. There was time for a lot of aggressive energy to evaporate before half-past twelve. Probably both of the men had come in from the outskirts and would have nowhere to wait but the streets or a public-house. Mr. Barnado might want to be back upon his own business at Epsom. He'd played his part in identifying me. Anyhow, I didn't intend to have any talk with Sumner before a witness. If he reappeared with Barnado I should refuse to see them. For Barnado alone I had a plan and for Sumner I had a plan, but not for the two of them together.

"My delaying policy was a good one. At half-past twelve Sumner came alone and was shown up to me.

"'Sit down there,' I said abruptly and leant back in my chair and stared at his face and waited in silence for him to begin.

"For some moments he did not speak. He had evidently expected me to open with some sort of question and he had come ready loaded with a reply. To be plumped into a chair and looked at, put him off his game. He tried to glare at me and I looked at his face as if I was looking at a map. As I did so I found my hatred for him shrinking and changing. It wasn't a case for hatred. He had such a poor, mean, silly face, a weak arrangement of plausibly handsome features. Every now and then it was convulsed by a nervous twitch. His straw-coloured moustache was clipped back more on one side than the other, and his rather frayed necktie had slipped down to display his collar stud and the grubbiness of his collar. He had pulled his mouth a little askew and thrust his face forward in an attempt at fierceness, and his rather watery blue eyes were as open and as protruded as he could manage.

"'Where's my wife, Smith?' he said at last.

"'Out of my reach, Mr. Sumner, and out of yours.'

"'Where've you hid her?'

"'She's gone,' I said. 'It's no work of mine.'

"'She's come back to you.'

"I shook my head.

"'You know where she is?'

"'She's gone clear, Sumner. You let her go.'

"'Let her go! _You_ let her go, but I'm not going to. I'm not that sort. Here's this girl you marry and mess about with and when she comes across a man who's a bit more of a man than you are and handles her as a woman ought to be handled, you go and chuck her out and divorce her, divorce her with her child coming, and then start planning and plotting to get her away from the man she's given her love to----'

"He stopped for want of words or breath. He wanted to exasperate me and start a shouting match. I said nothing.

"'I want Hetty back,' he said. 'She's my wife and I want her back. She's mine and the sooner this foolery stops the better.'

"I sat up to the desk and put my elbows on it.

"'You won't get her back,' I said very quietly. 'What are you going to do about it?'

"'By God! I'll have her back--if I swing for it.'

"'Exactly. And what are you going to do?'

"'What can't I do? I'm her husband.'

"'Well?'

"'You've got her.'

"'Not a scrap of her.'

"'She's missing. I can go to the police.'

"'Go to them. What will they do?'

"'I can put them on to you.'

"'Not a bit of it. They won't bother about me. If your wife's missing and you go to the police, they'll clear up all your gang with their enquiries. They'll be only too glad of the chance. Trouble me! They'll dig up the cellars in your house and in your previous house to find the body. They'll search you and ransack you. And what they don't do to you, your pals will.'

"Sumner leaned forward and grimaced like a gargoyle to give his words greater emphasis. '_Yew_ were the last man seen with her,' he said.

"'Not a scrap of evidence.'

"Sumner cursed vigorously. 'He saw you.'

"'I can deny that absolutely. Frowsty little witness your friend Barnado. Don't be too sure he'll stick it. Nasty business if a woman disappears and you find yourself trying to fix something that won't hold water on to someone her husband dislikes. If I were you, Sumner, I wouldn't take that line. Even if he backs you up, what does it prove? You know of nobody else who pretends to have seen me with Hetty. You won't be able to find anybody....'

"Mr. Sumner extended his hand towards my table. He was too far away to bang it properly so he pulled his chair up closer. The bang when it came was ineffective. 'Look 'ere,' he said and moistened his lips. 'I want my Hetty back and I'm going to have her back. You're precious cool and cucumberish and all that just now, but by God! I'll warm you up before I've done with you. You think you can get her away and bluff me off. Never made such a mistake in your life. Suppose I don't go to the police. Suppose I go for direct action. Suppose I come round to your place, and make a fuss with your wife."

"'That will be a nuisance,' I said.

"He followed up his advantage. 'A masterpiece of a nuisance.'

"I considered the forced fierceness of his face.

"'I shall say I know nothing about your wife's disappearance and that you are a blackmailing liar. People will believe me. My wife will certainly believe me. She'd make herself do so if your story was ten times as possible. Your friend Barnado and you will make a pretty couple of accusers. I shall say you are a crazy jealous fool, and if you keep the game up I shall have you run in. I'd not be altogether sorry to have you run in. There's one or two little things I don't like you for. I'd not be so very sorry to get quits.'

"I had the better of him. He was baffled and angry but I saw now plainly that he had no real fight in him.

"'And you know where she is?' he said.

"I was too full of the spirit of conflict now to be discreet. 'I know where she is. And you don't get her--whatever you do. And as I said before, What can you do about it?'

"'My God!' he said. 'My own wife.'

"I leant back with the air of a man who had finished an interview. I looked at my wrist-watch.

"He stood up.

"I looked up at him brightly. 'Well?' I said.

"'Look here!' he spluttered. 'I don't stand this. By God! I tell you I want Hetty. I want her. I want her and I'll do what I like with her. D'you think I'll take this? Me? She's mine, you dirty thief!'

"I took up a drawing for an illustration and held it in my hand, regarding him with an expression of mild patience that maddened him.

"'Didn't I marry her--when I needn't have? If you wanted her, why the devil didn't you keep her when you had her? I tell you I won't stand it.'

"'My dear Sumner, as I said before, What can you do about it?'

"He leant over the desk, shook a finger as though it was a pistol barrel in my face. 'I'll let daylight through you,' he said. 'I'll let daylight through you.'

"'I'll take my chance of that,' I said.

"He expressed his opinion of me for a bit.

"'I won't argue your points,' I said. 'I guess we're about through with this interview. Don't shock my clerk, please, when she comes in.' And I rang the bell on my desk.

"His parting shot was feeble. 'You've not heard the last of me. I mean what I told you.'

"'Mind the step,' said I.

"The door closed and left me strung up and trembling with excitement but triumphant. I felt I had beaten him and that I could go on beating him. It might be he would shoot. He'd probably got a revolver. But it was ten to one he'd take the trouble to get a fair chance at me and screw himself up to shooting pitch. And with his loose twitching face and shaky hand it was ten to one against his hitting me. He'd aim anyhow. He'd shoot too soon. And if he shot me it was ten to one he only wounded me slightly. Then I'd carry through my story against him. Milly might be shaken for a time, but I'd get the thing right again with her.

"I sat for a long time turning over the possibilities of the case. The more I considered it the more satisfied I was with my position. It was two o'clock and long past my usual lunch time when I went off to my club. I treated myself to the unusual luxury of a half-bottle of champagne."

§ 9

"I never believed Sumner would shoot me until I was actually shot.

"He waylaid me in the passage-way to the yard of Thunderstone House as I was returning from lunch just a week after our first encounter and when I was beginning to hope he had accepted his defeat. He had been drinking, and as soon as I saw his flushed face, half-angry and half-scared, I had an intimation of what might befall. I remember that I thought then that if anything happened he must get away because otherwise he might be left to tell his tale after I was dead. But I didn't really believe he was man enough to shoot and even now I do not believe that. He fired through sheer lack of nervous and muscular co-ordination.

"He did not produce his pistol until I was close up to him. 'Now then,' said he, 'you're for it. Where's my wife?' and out came the pistol a yard from me.

"I forget my answer. I probably said, 'Put that away' or something of that sort. And then I may have seemed about to snatch it. The report of the pistol, which sounded very loud to me, came at once, and a feeling as though I'd been kicked in the small of the back. The pistol was one of those that go on firing automatically as long as the trigger is gripped. It fired two other shots, and one got my knee and smashed it. 'Damn the thing!' he screamed and threw it down as though it had stung him. 'Get out, you fool. Run!' I said as I lurched towards him, and then as I fell I came within a foot of his terrified face as he dashed past me towards the main thoroughfare. He thrust me back with his hand as I reeled upon him.

"I think I rolled over on to my back into a sitting position after I fell, because I have a clear impression of him vanishing like the tail of a bolting rabbit into Tottenham Court Road. I saw a van and an omnibus pass across the space at the end of the street, heedless altogether of the pistol shots that had sounded so terrible in my ears. A girl and a man passed with equal indifference. He was clear. Poor little beast! I'd stolen his Hetty. And now----

"I was very clear-headed. A little numbed where I had been hit but not in pain. I was chiefly aware of my smashed knee, which looked very silly with its mixture of torn trouser and red stuff and a little splintered pink thing that I supposed was an end of bone.

"People from nowhere were standing about me and saying things to me. They had come out of the yard or from the public-house. I made a swift decision. 'Pistol went off in my hand,' I said, and shut my eyes.

"Then a fear of a hospital came upon me. 'My home quite handy,' I said. 'Eight Chester Terrace, Regent's Park. Get me there, please.'

"I heard them repeating the address and I recognised the voice of Crane & Newberry's door porter. 'That's right,' he was saying. 'It's Mr. Mortimer Smith. Anything I can do for you, Mr. Smith?'

"I do not remember much of the details of what followed. When they moved me there was pain. I seem to have been holding on to what I meant to say and do, and my memory does not seem to have recorded anything else properly. I may have fainted once or twice. Newberry was in it somehow. I think he took me home in his car. 'How did it happen?' he asked. That I remember quite clearly.

"'The thing went off in my hand,' I said.

"One thing I was very certain about. Whatever happened they were not going to hang that poor, silly, hunted cheat, Sumner. Whatever happened, the story of Hetty must not come out. If it did, Milly would think only one thing: that I had been unfaithful to her and that Sumner had killed me on that account. Hetty was all right now. I needn't bother about Hetty any more. I had to think of Milly--and Sumner. It is queer, but I seem to have known I was mortally wounded from the very instant I was shot.

"Milly appeared, full of solicitude.

"'Accident,' I said to her with all my strength. 'Went off in my hand.'

"My own bed.

"Clothes being cut away. Round my knee the cloth had stuck. The new grey suit which I'd meant should last the whole summer.

"Then two strangers became conspicuous, doctors, I suppose, whispering, and one of them had his sleeves up and showed a pair of fat pink arms. Sponges and a tinkle of water dripping into a basin. They prodded me about. Damn! That hurt! Then stinging stuff. What was the good of it? I was in the body they were prodding, and I knew all about it and I was sure that I was a dead man.

"Milly again.

"'My dear,' I whispered. 'Dear!' and her poor, tearful face beamed love upon me.

"Valiant Milly! Things had never been fair to her.

"Fanny? Had Newberry gone to fetch her? Anyhow he had vanished.

"She'd say nothing about Hetty. She was as safe as--safe as what?--what did one say?--any thing--safe.

"Poor dears! What a fuss they were all in. It seemed almost shameful of me to be glad that I was going out of it all. But I was glad. This pistol shot had come like the smashing of a window in a stuffy room. My chief desire was to leave kind and comforting impressions on those poor survivors who might still have to stay on in the world of muddle for years and years. Life! What a muddle and a blundering it had been! I'd never have to grow old now anyhow....

"There was an irruption. People coming in from the dressing-room. One was a police inspector in uniform. The other showed policeman through his plain clothes. Now was the time for it! I was quite clear-headed--quite. I must be careful what I said. If I didn't want to say anything I could just close my eyes.

"'Bleeding internally,' said someone.

"Then the police inspector sat down on the bed. What a whale he was!--and asked me questions. I wondered if anyone had caught a glimpse of Sumner. Sumner, bolting like a rabbit. I must risk that.

"'It went off in my hand,' I said.

"'What was he saying? How long had I had that revolver?

"'Bought it this lunch time,' I said.

"Did he ask why? He did. 'Keep up my shooting.'

"Where? He wanted to know where. 'Highbury.'

"'What part of Highbury?' They wanted to trace the pistol. That wouldn't do. Give Mr. Inspector a paper chase. '_Near_ Highbury.'

"'Not in Highbury?'

"I decided to be faint and stupid. 'That way,' I said faintly.

"'A pawnshop?'

"Best not to answer. Then as if by an effort, 'Lil' shop.'

"'Unredeemed pledges?'

"I said nothing to that. I was thinking of another touch to the picture I was painting.

"I spoke with weak indignation. 'I didn't think it was loaded. How was I to know it was loaded? It ought not to have been sold--loaded like that. I was just looking at it--

"I stopped short and shammed exhaustion. Then I felt that I was not shamming exhaustion. I was exhausted. Gods! but the stuffing was out of me! I was sinking, sinking, out of the bedroom, out from among this group of people. They were getting little and faint and flimsy. Was there anything more to say? Too late if there was. I was falling asleep, falling into a sleep, so profound, so fathomless....

"Far away now was the little roomful of people, and infinitely small.

"'He's going!' somebody said in a minute voice.

"I seemed to come back for an instant.

"I heard the rustle of Milly's dress as she came across the room to me....

"And then, then I heard Hetty's voice again and opened my eyes and saw Hetty bending down over me--in that lovely place upon this mountain-side. Only Hetty had become my dear Sunray who is mistress of my life. And the sunshine was on us and on her face, and I stretched because my back was a little stiff and one of my knees was twisted."

"'Wake up! I said,'" said Sunray. "'Wake up,' and I shook you."

"And then we came and laughed at you," said Radiant. "Firefly and I."

"And you said, 'then there is another life,'" said Firefly. "And the tale is only a dream! It has been a good tale, Sarnac, and somehow you have made me think it was true."

"As it is," said Sarnac. "For I am as certain I was Henry Mortimer Smith yesterday as I am that I am Sarnac here and now."

CHAPTER THE EIGHTH

THE EPILOGUE

§ 1

The guest-master poked the sinking fire into a last effort. "So am I," he said, and then with profound conviction, "_That tale is true._"

"But how could it be true?" asked Willow.

"I should be readier to believe it true if Sarnac had not brought in Sunray as Hetty," said Radiant. "It was very dreamlike, the way Hetty grew more and more like his dear lady and at last dissolved altogether into her."

"But if Smith was a sort of anticipation of Sarnac," said Starlight, "then it was natural for him to choose as his love a sort of anticipation of Sunray."

"But are there any other anticipations in the story?" asked Willow. "Did you recognise any other people who are intimate with you both? Is there a Fanny in this world? Is there a Matilda Good or a brother Ernest? Was Sarnac's mother like Martha Smith?"

"That tale," said the guest-master, stoutly, "was no dream. It was a memory floating up out of the deep darkness of forgotten things into a kindred brain."

Sarnac thought, "What is a personality but a memory? If the memory of Harry Mortimer Smith is in my brain, then I am Smith. I feel as sure that I was Smith two thousand years ago as that I was Sarnac this morning. Sometimes before this in my dreams I have had a feeling that I lived again forgotten lives. Have none of you felt that?"

"I dreamt the other day," said Radiant, "that I was a panther that haunted a village of huts in which lived naked children and some very toothsome dogs. And how I was hunted for three years and shot at five times before I was killed. I can remember how I killed an old woman gathering sticks and hid part of her body under the roots of a tree to finish it on the morrow. It was a very vivid dream. And as I dreamt it it was by no means horrible. But it was not a clear and continuous dream like yours. A panther's mind is not clear and continuous, but passes from flashes of interest to interludes of apathy and utter forgetfulness.

"When children have dreams of terror, of being in the wild with prowling beasts, of long pursuits and hairbreadth escapes, perhaps it is the memory of some dead creature that lives again in them?" asked Starlight. "What do we know of the stuff of memory that lies on the other side of matter? What do we know of the relations of consciousness to matter and energy? For four thousand years men have speculated about these things, and we know no more to-day than they did in Athens when Plato taught and Aristotle studied. Science increases and the power of man grows but only inside the limits of life's conditions. We may conquer space and time, but we shall never conquer the mystery of what we are, and why we can be matter that feels and wills. My brother and I have much to do with animals and more and more do I perceive that what they are I am. They are instruments with twenty strings while we have ten thousand, but they are instruments like ourselves; what plays upon them plays upon us, and what kills them kills us. Life and death alike are within the crystal sphere that limits us for ever. Life cannot penetrate and death will not penetrate that limitation. What memories are we cannot tell. If I choose to believe that they float away like gossamer nets when we die, and that they float I know not where, and that they can come back presently into touch with other such gossamer nets, who can contradict me? Maybe life from its very beginning has been spinning threads and webs of memories. Not a thing in the past, it may be, that has not left its memories about us. Some day we may learn to gather in that forgotten gossamer, we may learn to weave its strands together again, until the whole past is restored to us and life becomes one. Then perhaps the crystal sphere will break. And however that may be, and however these things may be explained, I can well believe without any miracles that Sarnac has touched down to the real memory of a human life that lived and suffered two thousand years ago. And I believe that, because of the reality of the story he told. I have felt all along that whatever interrupting question we chose to ask, had we asked what buttons he wore on his jacket or how deep the gutters were at the pavement edge or what was the price he had paid for his cigarettes, he would have been ready with an answer, more exact and sure than any historian could have given."

"And I too believe that," said Sunray. "I have no memory of being Hetty, but in everything he said and did, even in his harshest and hardest acts, Smith and Sarnac were one character. I do not question for a moment that Sarnac lived that life."

§ 2

"But the hardness of it!" cried Firefly; "the cruelty! The universal heartache!"

"It could have been only a dream," persisted Willow.

"It is not the barbarism I think of," said Firefly; "not the wars and diseases, the shortened, crippled lives, the ugly towns, the narrow countryside, but worse than that the sorrow of the heart, the universal unkindness, the universal failure to understand or care for the thwarted desires and needs of others. As I think of Sarnac's story I cannot think of any one creature in it who was happy--as we are happy. It is all a story of love crossed, imaginations like flies that have fallen into gum, things withheld and things forbidden. And all for nothing. All for pride and spite. Not all that world had a giver who gave with both hands.... Poor Milly! Do you think she did not know how coldly you loved her, Sarnac? Do you think her jealousy was not born of a certainty and a fear? ... A lifetime, a whole young man's lifetime, a quarter of a century, and this poor Harry Smith never once met a happy soul and came only once within sight of happiness! And he was just one of scores and hundreds of millions! They went heavily and clumsily and painfully, oppressing and obstructing each other, from the cradle to the grave."

This was too much for the guest-master, who almost wailed aloud. "But surely there was happiness! Surely there were moods and phases of happiness!"

"In gleams and flashes," said Sarnac. "But I verily believe that what Firefly says is true. In all my world there were no happy lives."

"Not even children?"

"Lives, I said, not parts of lives. Children would laugh and dance for a while if they were born in Hell."

"And out of that darkness," said Radiant; "in twenty short centuries our race has come to the light and tolerance, the sweet freedoms and charities of our lives to-day."

"Which is no sort of comfort to me," said Firefly, "when I think of the lives that _have_ been."

"Unless this is the solution," the guest-master cried, "that everyone is presently to dream back the lives that have gone. Unless the poor memory-ghosts of all those sad lives that have been are to be brought into the consolation of our happiness. Here, poor souls, for your comfort is the land of heart's desire and all your hopes come true. Here you live again in your ampler selves. Here lovers are not parted for loving and your loves are not your torment.... Now I see why men must be immortal, for otherwise the story of man's martyrdom is too pitiful to tell. Many good men there were like me, jolly men with a certain plumpness, men with an excellent taste for wine and cookery, who loved men almost as much as they loved the food and drink that made men, and they could not do the jolly work I do and make comfort and happiness every day for fresh couples of holiday friends. Surely presently I shall find the memories of the poor licensed innkeeper I was in those ancient days, the poor, overruled, ill-paid publican, handing out bad stuff in wrath and shame, I shall find all his troubles welling up again in me. Consoled in this good inn. If it was I who suffered in those days, I am content, but if it was some other good fellow who died and never came to this, then there is no justice in the heart of God. So I swear by immortality now and henceforth--not for greed of the future but in the name of the wasted dead.

"Look!" the guest-master continued. "Morning comes and the cracks at the edge of the door-curtain grow brighter than the light within. Go all of you and watch the mountain glow. I will mix you a warm bowl of drink and then we will sleep for an hour or so before you breakfast and go your way."

§ 3

"It was a life," said Sarnac, "and it was a dream, a dream within this life; and this life too is a dream. Dreams within dreams, dreams containing dreams, until we come at last, maybe, to the Dreamer of all dreams, the Being who is all beings. Nothing is too wonderful for life and nothing is too beautiful."

He got up and thrust back the great curtain of the guest-house room. "All night we have been talking and living in the dark Ages of Confusion and now the sunrise is close at hand."

He went out upon the portico of the guest-house and stood still, surveying the great mountains that rose out of cloud and haze, dark blue and mysterious in their recesses and soaring up at last into the flush of dawn.

He stood quite still and all the world seemed still, except that, far away and far below, a mist of sounds beneath the mountain mists, a confusion of birds was singing.

¶ Mr. Wells has also written the following novels:

THE WHEELS OF CHANCE LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM KIPPS TONO-BUNGAY ANN VERONICA MR. POLLY THE NEW MACHIAVELLI MARRIAGE THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMAN BEALBY THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH THE SOUL OF A BISHOP JOAN AND PETER THE UNDYING FIRE THE SECRET PLACES OF THE HEART

¶ The following fantastic and imaginative romances:

THE TIME MACHINE THE WONDERFUL VISIT THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU THE INVISIBLE MAN THE WAR OF THE WORLDS THE SLEEPER AWAKES THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON THE SEA LADY THE FOOD OF THE GODS IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET THE WAR IN THE AIR THE WORLD SET FREE MEN LIKE GODS

¶ Numerous short stories collected under the following titles:

THE STOLEN BACILLUS THE PLATTNER STORY TALES OF SPACE AND TIME TWELVE STORIES AND A DREAM

¶ The same short stories will also be found in three volumes:

TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED TALES OF LIFE AND ADVENTURE TALES OF WONDER

¶ A Series of books on social, religious and political questions:

ANTICIPATIONS (1900) A MODERN UTOPIA THE FUTURE IN AMERICA NEW WORLDS FOR OLD FIRST AND LAST THINGS GOD THE INVISIBLE KING THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS THE SALVAGING OF CIVILISATION WASHINGTON AND THE HOPE OF PEACE A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD THE STORY OF A GREAT SCHOOLMASTER

¶ And two little books about children's play, called:

FLOOR GAMES and LITTLE WARS