Chapter 13

"Then you've changed," said Romarin--wondering, however, in his secret heart whether Marsden had changed very much in that respect after all.

Marsden gave a short honk of a laugh.

"You didn't suppose I hadn't changed, did you?" Then he leaned suddenly forward. "This is rather a mistake, Romarin--rather a mistake," he said.

"What is?"

"This--our meeting again. Quite a mistake."

Romarin sighed. "I had hoped not," he said.

Marsden leaned forward again, with another gesture Romarin remembered very well--dinner knife in hand, edge and palm upwards, punctuating and expounding with the point.

"I tell you, it's a mistake," he said, knife and hand balanced. "You can't reopen things like this. You don't really _want_ to reopen them; you only want to reopen certain of them; you want to pick and choose among things, to approve and disapprove. There must have been somewhere or other something in me you didn't altogether dislike--I can't for the life of me think what it was, by the way; and you want to lay stress on that and to sink the rest. Well, you can't. I won't let you. I'll not submit my life to you like that. If you want to go into things, all right; but it must be all or none. And I'd like another drink."

He put the knife down with a little clap as Romarin beckoned to the waiter.

There was distress on Romarin's face. He was not conscious of having adopted a superior attitude. But again he told himself that he must make allowances. Men who don't come off in Life's struggle are apt to be touchy, and he was; after all, the same old Marsden, the man with whom he desired to be at peace.

"Are you quite fair to me?" he asked presently, in a low voice.

Again the knife was taken up and its point advanced.

"Yes, I am," said Marsden in a slightly raised voice; and he indicated with the knife the mirror at the end of the table. "You know you've done well, and I, to all appearances, haven't; you can't look at that glass and not know it. But I've followed the line of my development too, no less logically than you. My life's been mine, and I'm not going to apologise for it to a single breathing creature. More, I'm proud of it. At least, there's been singleness of intention about it. So I think I'm strictly fair in pointing that out when you talk about helping me."

"Perhaps so, perhaps so," Romarin agreed a little sadly. "It's your tone more than anything else that makes things a little difficult. Believe me, I've no end in my mind except pure friendliness."

"No-o-o," said Marsden--a long "no" that seemed to deliberate, to examine, and finally to admit. "No. I believe that. And you usually get what you set out for. Oh yes. I've watched your rise--I've made a point of watching it. It's been a bit at a time, but you've got there. You're that sort. It's on your forehead--your destiny."

Romarin smiled.

"Hallo, that's new, isn't it?" he said. "It wasn't your habit to talk much about destiny, if I remember rightly. Let me see; wasn't this more your style--'will, passion, laughs-at-impossibilities and says,' et cetera--and so forth? Wasn't that it? With always the suspicion not far away that you did things more from theoretical conviction than real impulse after all?"

A dispassionate observer would have judged that the words went somewhere near home. Marsden was scraping together with the edge of his knife the crumbs of his broken roll. He scraped them into a little square, and then trimmed the corners. Not until the little pile was shaped to his liking did he look surlily up.

"Let it rest, Romarin," he said curtly. "Drop it," he added. "Let it alone. If I begin to talk like that, too, we shall only cut one another up. Clink glasses--there--and let it alone."

Mechanically Romarin clinked; but his bald brow was perplexed.

"'Cut one another up?'" he repeated.

"Yes. Let it alone."

"'Cut one another up?'" he repeated once more. "You puzzle me entirely."

"Well, perhaps I'm altogether wrong. I only wanted to warn you that I've dared a good many things in my time. Now drop it."

Romarin had fine brown eyes, under Oriental arched brows. Again they noted the singularly vicious look of the man opposite. They were full of mistrust and curiosity, and he stroked his silver beard.

"Drop it?" he said slowly ... "No, let's go on. I want to hear more of this."

"I'd much rather have another drink in peace and quietness.... Waiter!"

Either leaned back in his chair, surveying the other. "You're a perverse devil still," was Romarin's thought. Marsden's, apparently, was of nothing but the whiskey and soda the waiter had gone to fetch.

* * * * *

Romarin was inclined to look askance at a man who could follow up a gin and bitters with three or four whiskeys and soda without turning a hair. It argued the seasoned cask. Marsden had bidden the waiter leave the bottle and the syphon on the table, and was already mixing himself another stiff peg.

"Well," he said, "since you will have it so--to the old days."

"To the old days," said Romarin, watching him gulp it down.

"Queer, looking back across all that time at 'em, isn't it? How do you feel about it?"

"In a mixed kind of way, I think; the usual thing: pleasure and regret mingled."

"Oh, you have regrets, have you?"

"For certain things, yes. Not, let me say, my turn-up with you, Marsden," he laughed. "That's why I chose the old place--" he gave a glance round at its glittering newness. "Do you happen to remember what all that was about? I've only the vaguest idea."

Marsden gave him a long look. "That all?" he asked.

"Oh, I remember in a sort of way. That 'Romantic' soap-bubble of yours was really at the bottom of it, I suspect. Tell me," he smiled, "did you really suppose Life could be lived on those mad lines you used to lay down?"

"My life," said Marsden calmly, "has been."

"Not literally."

"Literally."

"You mean to say that you haven't outgrown _that_?"

"I hope not."

Romarin had thrown up his handsome head. "Well, well!" he murmured incredulously.

"Why 'well, well'?" Marsden demanded.... "But, of course, you never did and never will know what I meant."

"By Romance? ... No, I can't say that I did; but as I conceived it, it was something that began in appetite and ended in diabetes."

"Not philosophic, eh?" Marsden inquired, picking up a chicken bone.

"Highly unphilosophic," said Romarin, shaking his head.

"Hm!" grunted Marsden, stripping the bone... "Well, I grant it pays in a different way."

"It does pay, then?" Romarin asked.

"Oh yes, it pays."

The restaurant had filled up. It was one frequented by young artists, musicians, journalists and the clingers to the rather frayed fringes of the Arts. From time to time heads were turned to look at Romarin's portly and handsome figure, which the Press, the Regent Street photographic establishments, and the Academy Supplements had made well known. The plump young Frenchwoman within the glazed cash office near the door, at whom Marsden had several times glanced in a way at which Romarin had frowned, was aware of the honour done the restaurant; and several times the blond-bearded proprietor had advanced and inquired with concern whether the dinner and the service was to the liking of M'sieu.

And the eyes that were turned to Romarin plainly wondered who the scallawag dining with him might be.

Since Romarin had chosen that their conversation should be of the old days, and without picking and choosing, Marsden was quite willing that it should be so. Again he was casting the bullets of bread into his mouth, and again Romarin was conscious of irritation. Marsden, too, noticed it; but in awaiting the _rôti_ he still continued to roll and bolt the pellets, washing them down with gulps of whiskey and soda.

"Oh yes, it paid," he resumed. "Not in that way, of course--" he indicated the head, quickly turned away again, of an aureoled youngster with a large bunch of black satin tie, "--not in admiration of that sort, but in other ways--"

"Tell me about it."

"Certainly, if you want it. But you're my host. Won't you let me hear your side of it all first?"

"But I thought you said you knew that--had followed my career?"

"So I have. It's not your list of honours and degrees; let me see, what are you? R.A., D.C.L., Doctor of Literature, whatever that means, and Professor of this, that, and the other, and not at the end of it yet. I know all that. I don't say you haven't earned it; I admire your painting; but it's not that. I want to know what it _feels_ like to be up there where you are."

It was a childish question, and Romarin felt foolish in trying to answer it. Such things were the things the adoring aureoled youngster a table or two away would have liked to ask. Romarin recognised in Marsden the old craving for sensation; it was part of the theoretical creed Marsden had made for himself, of doing things, not for their own sakes, but in order that he might have done them. Of course, it had appeared to a fellow like that, that Romarin himself had always had a calculated end in view; he had not; Marsden merely measured Romarin's peck out of his own bushel. It had been Marsden who, in self-consciously seeking his own life, had lost it, and Romarin was more than a little inclined to suspect that the vehemence with which he protested that he had not lost it was precisely the measure of the loss.

But he essayed it--essayed to give Marsden a _résumé_ of his career. He told him of the stroke of sheer luck that had been the foundation of it all, the falling ill of another painter who had turned over certain commissions to him. He told him of his poor but happy marriage, and of the windfall, not large, but timely, that had come to his wife. He told him of fortunate acquaintanceships happily cultivated, of his first important commission, of the fresco that had procured for him his Associateship, of his sale to the Chantrey, and of his quietly remunerative Visitorships and his work on Boards and Committees.

And as he talked, Marsden drew his empty glass to him, moistened his finger with a little spilt liquid, and began to run the finger round the rim of the glass. They had done that formerly, a whole roomful of them, producing, when each had found the note of his instrument, a high, thin, intolerable singing. To this singing Romarin strove to tell his tale.

But that thin and bat-like note silenced him. He ended lamely, with some empty generalisation on success.

"Ah, but success in what?" Marsden demanded, interrupting his playing on the glass for a moment.

"In your aim, whatever it may be."

"Ah!" said Marsden, resuming his performance.

Romarin had sought in his recital to minimise differences in circumstances; but Marsden seemed bent on aggravating them. He had the miserable advantage of the man who has nothing to lose. And bit by bit, Romarin had begun to realise that he was going considerably more than halfway to meet this old enemy of his, and that amity seemed as far on as ever. In his heart he began to feel the foreknowledge that their meeting could have no conclusion. He hated the man, the look of his face and the sound of his voice, as much as ever.

The proprietor approached with profoundest apology in his attitude. M'sieu would pardon him, but the noise of the glass ... it was annoying ... another M'sieu had made complaint....

"Eh?..." cried Marsden. "Oh, that! Certainly! It can be put to a much better purpose."

He refilled the glass.

The liquor had begun to tell on him. A quarter of the quantity would have made a clean-living man incapably drunk, but it had only made Marsden's eyes bright. He gave a sarcastic laugh.

"And is that all?" he asked.

Romarin replied shortly that that was all.

"You've missed out the R.A., and the D.C.L."

"Then let me add that I'm a Doctor of Civil Law and a full Member of the Royal Academy," said Romarin, almost at the end of his patience. "And now, since you don't think much of it, may I hear your own account?"

"Oh, by all means. I don't know, however, that--" he broke off to throw a glance at a woman who had just entered the restaurant--a divesting glance that caused Romarin to redden to his crown and drop his eyes. "I was going to say that you may think as little of my history as I do of yours. Supple woman that; when the rather scraggy blonde does take it into her head to be a devil she's the worst kind there is...."

Without apology Romarin looked at his watch.

"All right," said Marsden, smiling, "for what _I've_ got out of life, then. But I warn you, it's entirely discreditable."

Romarin did not doubt it.

"But it's mine, and I boast of it. I've done--barring receiving honours and degrees--everything--everything! If there's anything I haven't done, tell me and lend me a sovereign, and I'll go and do it."

"You haven't told the story."

"That's so. Here goes then ... Well, you know, unless you've forgotten, how I began...."

Fruit and nutshells and nutcrackers lay on the table between them, and at the end of it, shielded from draughts by the menu cards, the coffee apparatus simmered over its elusive blue flame. Romarin was taking the rind from a pear with a table-knife, and Marsden had declined port in favour of a small golden liqueur of brandy. Every seat in the restaurant was now occupied, and the proprietor himself had brought his finest cigarettes and cigars. The waiter poured out the coffee, and departed with the apparatus in one hand and his napkin in the other.

Marsden was already well into his tale...

The frightful unction with which he told it appalled Romarin. It was as he had said--there was nothing he had not done and did not exult in with a sickening exultation. It had, indeed, ended in diabetes. In the pitiful hunting down of sensation to the last inch he had been fiendishly ingenious and utterly unimaginative. His unholy curiosity had spared nothing, his unnatural appetite had known no truth. It was grinning sin. The details of it simply cannot be told....

And his vanity in it all was prodigious. Romarin was pale as he listened. What! In order that _this_ malignant growth in Society's breast should be able to say "I know," had sanctities been profaned, sweet conventions assailed, purity blackened, soundness infected, and all that was bright and of the day been sunk in the quagmire that this creature of the night had called--yes, stilled called--by the gentle name of Romance? Yes, so it had been. Not only had men and women suffered dishonour, but manhood and womanhood and the clean institutions by which alone the creature was suffered to exist had been brought to shame. And what was he to look at when it was all done?...

"Romance--Beauty--the Beauty of things as they are!" he croaked.

If faces in the restaurant were now turned to Romarin, it was the horror on Romarin's own face that drew them. He drew out his handkerchief and mopped his brow.

"But," he stammered presently, "you are speaking of generalities--horrible theories--things diabolically conceivable to be done--"

"What?" cried Marsden, checked for a moment in his horrible triumph. "No, by God! I've done 'em, done 'em! Don't you understand? If you don't, question me!..."

"No, no!" cried Romarin.

"But I say yes! You came for this, and you shall have it! I tried to stop you, but you wanted it, and by God you shall have it! You think your life's been full and mine empty? Ha ha!... Romance! I had the conviction of it, and I've had the courage too! I haven't told you a tenth of it! What would you like? Chamber-windows when Love was hot? The killing of a man who stood in my way? (I've fought a duel, and killed.) The squeezing of the juice out of life like _that_?" He pointed to Romarin's plate; Romarin had been eating grapes. "Did you find me saying I'd do a thing and then drawing back from it when we--" he made a quick gesture of both hands towards the middle of the restaurant floor.

"When we fought--?"

"Yes, when we fought, here!... Oh no, oh no! I've lived, I tell you, every moment! Not a title, not a degree, but I've lived such a life as you never dreamed of--!"

"Thank God--"

But suddenly Marsden's voice, which had risen, dropped again. He began to shake with interior chuckles. They were the old, old chuckles, and they filled Romarin with a hatred hardly to be borne. The sound of the animal's voice had begun it, and his every word, look, movement, gesture, since they had entered the restaurant, had added to it. And he was now chuckling, chuckling, shaking with chuckles, as if some monstrous tit-bit still remained to be told. Already Romarin had tossed aside his napkin, beckoned to the waiter, and said, "M'sieu dines with me...."

"Ho ho ho ho!" came the drunken sounds. "It's a long time since M'sieu dined here with his old friend Romarin! Do you remember the last time? Do you remember it? _Pif, pan_! Two smacks across the table, Romarin--oh, you got it in very well!--and then, _brrrrr_! quick! Back with the tables--all the fellows round--Farquharson for me and Smith for you, and then to it, Romarin!... And you really don't remember what it was all about?..."

Romarin had remembered. His face was not the face of the philosophic master of Life now.

"You said she shouldn't--little Pattie Hines you know--you said she shouldn't--"

Romarin sprang half from his chair, and brought his fist down on the table.

"And by Heaven, she didn't! At least that's one thing you haven't done!"

Marsden too had risen unsteadily.

"Oho, oho? You think that?"

A wild thought flashed across Romarin's brain.

"You mean--?"

"I mean?... Oho, oho! Yes, I mean! She did, Romarin...."

The mirrors, mistily seen through the smoke of half a hundred cigars and cigarettes, the Loves and Shepherdesses of the garish walls, the diners starting up in their places, all suddenly seemed to swing round in a great half-circle before Romarin's eyes. The next moment, feeling as if he stood on something on which he found it difficult to keep his balance, he had caught up the table-knife with which he had peeled the pear and had struck at the side of Marsden's neck. The rounded blade snapped, but he struck again with the broken edge, and left the knife where it entered. The table appeared uptilted almost vertical; over it Marsden's head disappeared; it was followed by a shower of glass, cigars, artificial flowers and the tablecloth at which he clutched; and the dirty American cloth of the table top was left bare.

* * * * *

But the edge behind which Marsden's face had disappeared remained vertical. A group of scene-shifters were moving a flat of scenery from a theatre into a tumbril-like cart...

And Romarin knew that, past, present, and future, he had seen it all in an instant, and that Marsden stood behind that painted wing.

And he knew, too, that he had only to wait until that flat passed and to take Marsden's arm and enter the restaurant, _and it would be so_. A drowning man is said to see all in one unmeasurable instant of time; a year-long dream is but, they say, an instantaneous arrangement in the moment of waking of the molecules we associate with ideas; and the past of history and the future of prophecy are folded up in the mystic moment we call the present....

_It would come true_....

For one moment Romarin stood; the next, he had turned and run for his life.

At the corner of the street he collided with a loafer, and only the wall saved them from going down. Feverishly Romarin plunged his hand into his pocket and brought out a handful of silver. He crammed it into the loafer's hand.

"Here--quick--take it!" he gasped. "There's a man there, by that restaurant door--he's waiting for Mr. Romarin--tell him--tell him--tell him Mr. Romarin's had an accident--"

And he dashed away, leaving the man looking at the silver in his palm.

THE CIGARETTE CASE

"A cigarette, Loder?" I said, offering my case. For the moment Loder was not smoking; for long enough he had not been talking.

"Thanks," he replied, taking not only the cigarette, but the case also. The others went on talking; Loder became silent again; but I noticed that he kept my cigarette case in his hand, and looked at it from time to time with an interest that neither its design nor its costliness seemed to explain. Presently I caught his eye.

"A pretty case," he remarked, putting it down on the table. "I once had one exactly like it."

I answered that they were in every shop window.

"Oh yes," he said, putting aside any question of rarity.... "I lost mine."

"Oh?..."

He laughed. "Oh, that's all right--I got it back again--don't be afraid I'm going to claim yours. But the way I lost it--found it--the whole thing--was rather curious. I've never been able to explain it. I wonder if you could?"

I answered that I certainly couldn't till I'd heard it, whereupon Loder, taking up the silver case again and holding it in his hand as he talked, began:

"This happened in Provence, when I was about as old as Marsham there--and every bit as romantic. I was there with Carroll--you remember poor old Carroll and what a blade of a boy he was--as romantic as four Marshams rolled into one. (Excuse me, Marsham, won't you? It's a romantic tale, you see, or at least the setting is.) ... We were in Provence, Carroll and I; twenty-four or thereabouts; romantic, as I say; and--and this happened.

"And it happened on the top of a whole lot of other things, you must understand, the things that do happen when you're twenty-four. If it hadn't been Provence, it would have been somewhere else, I suppose, nearly, if not quite as good; but this was Provence, that smells (as you might say) of twenty-four as it smells of argelasse and wild lavender and broom....

"We'd had the dickens of a walk of it, just with knapsacks--had started somewhere in the Ardèche and tramped south through the vines and almonds and olives--Montélimar, Orange, Avignon, and a fortnight at that blanched skeleton of a town, Les Baux. We'd nothing to do, and had gone just where we liked, or rather just where Carroll had liked; and Carroll had had the _De Bello Gallico_ in his pocket, and had had a notion, I fancy, of taking in the whole ground of the Roman conquest--I remember he lugged me off to some place or other, Pourrières I believe its name was, because--I forget how many thousands--were killed in a river-bed there, and they stove in the water-casks so that if the men wanted water they'd have to go forward and fight for it. And then we'd gone on to Arles, where Carroll had fallen in love with everything that had a bow of black velvet in her hair, and after that Tarascon, Nîmes, and so on, the usual round--I won't bother you with that. In a word, we'd had two months of it, eating almonds and apricots from the trees, watching the women at the communal washing-fountains under the dark plane-trees, singing _Magali_ and the _Qué Cantes_, and Carroll yarning away all the time about Caesar and Vercingetorix and Dante, and trying to learn Provençal so that he could read the stuff in the _Journal des Félibriges_ that he'd never have looked at if it had been in English....