She stepped briskly into the room, looked round and smiled.

"Three times," she declared as I assisted her to remove her jacket. "But I forgive you if you'll only play that won—derful thing again!"

In person Miss Fraenkel was of middle size, admirably proportioned and situated in tone on the borderland between the blonde and the brunette. By which I mean that her hair was brown, her eye a warm hazel, and her skin of a satiny pallor that formed an effective background for a delightful flush that suffused her piquant features whenever her enthusiasm was roused. And her enthusiasm was continually being roused. To us cold Britons the abandon with which she, in common with her countrywomen, gave herself up to the enjoyment of a picture, a book, a landscape, or for that matter of a person, was a most fascinating spectacle. American women strongly resemble champagne. At a certain age they are incomparably stimulating, but intimacy with them involves a sort of "headiness" that demands discretion; a nervous energy emanates from them that tends to relax the critical faculty. There is, moreover, a tendency to turgescence in their speech that leads the unwary into a false estimate of their intellectual range.

It was some time before the conversation could be guided round to the subject which we three at any rate had at heart. Explosive cries of delight over Mac's last etching, Bill's new waist and a Chinese print I had recently acquired, were a matter of course. In deference to an unuttered request we adjourned to the studio upstairs, for Miss Fraenkel had been from the first candidly attracted by the suggestion of bohemianism in our menage. It was not her romantic view of an artist's life, however, that distinguished her from any other young and romantic lady, but her frankness and eloquence in acknowledging it. "It must be grand," she had told me in Lexington Avenue, "to be a grisette." We had admitted that it must, but had been unable to share her regret that she had not been a man "so that she could see everything." She was very charming as she was.

Of course she knew of the painter-cousin and indeed, as soon as she could think of it, gave us the needed opening.

"I saw a letter with an English postmark for you," she observed, examining the bottom of a piece of china that rested near her shoulder. "Did you get it?"

"We want you to give us an opinion about it, Miss Fraenkel," said Bill, bringing out the letter and giving it to her. She accepted the packet in some uncertainty.

"I!" she said, "give an opinion? I don't get it, I'm afraid."

"Read it," said Bill.

And she did. We sat round her, as she sat on the broad flat box that Mac called a "throne," in a semicircle, and studied the varying expressions that crossed her face as her eyes travelled down the pages. It occurred to me after I had retired to my room that night, that an English girl of twenty-one would not have weathered the concentrated gaze of three strangers with such serenity of features. An observant and invisible critic might have imagined us to have been awaiting the decision of a young and charming Sibyl, so intently did we gaze and so neglectful was she of our regard. This apparent coldness was explained to me by Bill as a characteristic of the American woman. "They like to be admired," she told me. "And so they don't mind if you do stare at them."

Miss Fraenkel looked up with a smile of comprehension.

"What a perfectly lovely letter!" she exclaimed.

Bill took the sheets and thrust them into the envelope.

"He must be a very interesting man, don't you think?"

"Surely! Oh, I should give anything to see his home. You've described it to me, so I know all about it. Gainsborough landscape, and red tiles on the cottages!" She clasped her hands.

"I mean the man my cousin met," said Bill, gently. "Carville."

"Oh, him!" Miss Fraenkel looked at each of us for an instant to catch some inkling of our behaviour.

"Same name as——" and Mac jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

Miss Fraenkel's face did not clear.

"We thought," I said heavily, "that this man in England, you know, might have——" I stopped, dismayed by her lack of appreciation. She seemed unable to grasp the simple links of our brilliant theory. We had omitted to calculate upon the indifference of the modern American temperament to names. A foul murder had been committed a short time back by a gambler named Fraenkel, yet she would have laughed at the suggestion that such a coincidence should cause her any annoyance.

"I don't get it," she said, smiling, and we saw plainly enough that she did not get it. We were crushed. I explained in more detail the reason for which we had ventured to connect the two stories. We could see her trying to understand.

"You mean—just as if it was a photo-play," she faltered.

It does not matter now, and I admit that this put me out of humour. And yet it was true. We were really no nearer an actual and bona fide solution of Mrs. Carville's story than if we had simply tried to make, as Miss Fraenkel said, a photo-play. The others laughed at my downcast countenance.

"Well," I said, "you said Miss Fraenkel had tried them and found them guilty, Mac."

"What I meant was, Miss Fraenkel had formed her own opinion of the business."

"Yes," she said, "I have."

"Now we shall hear something," chirped Bill.

"Listen," said Miss Fraenkel. "It's very likely an assumed name."

It was our turn to look bewildered.

"Yes?" said Bill. "What then?"

"And——" went on Miss Fraenkel, making little motions with her hands as though she were trying to catch something that eluded her grasp. "And—oh! he's being held for some game in New York. She's got away with it, you see."

Miss Fraenkel waited for this appalling development to sink into our minds. I don't think it was given to any of us at the moment to divine just what had happened to Miss Fraenkel. Even seven years in the country were not sufficient training in American psychology to realize it at once. We sat and looked at her, temporarily dazed by what we took to be a story built upon exclusive information. And she sat and looked at us, as pleased as a child at the success of her manoeuvre.

"Why," stammered Bill, blankly through her glasses, "how do you know?"

"I don't know," replied Miss Fraenkel. "I just made it up, same's you." And she included us all in a brilliant flash of her hazel eyes.

We changed the subject after that. In self-defence we changed the subject, for it was plain that when it came to making photo-plays we held a very poor hand. Moreover, we saw that Miss Fraenkel did not and could not take our ponderous interest in Mrs. Carville seriously. To argue that she ought to was no better logic than to say that since she was crazy about Chinese prints, she ought to be friendly with the Chinese laundryman in Chestnut Street. We regarded the nations of Europe as repositories of splendid traditions, magnificent even in their decay. Miss Fraenkel regarded them as rag-baskets from which the American Eagle was picking a heterogeneous mass of rubbish, rubbish that might possibly, after much screening, become worthy of civic privilege.

The wisdom of our action was proved by Miss Fraenkel herself, for not only did she make no further mention of Mrs. Carville before she rose to go, but even when I remarked (I escorted her to her home) pointing to the great lantern in the Metropolitan Tower, twenty miles away, shining like a star above the horizon, "that light shines on many things that are hidden from us," she failed to apply the sententious reflection to her own story, merely looking at me with an appreciative smile. She had forgotten our discussion utterly, and I was quite sure that unless we mentioned it, she would not refer to it again.



CHAPTER V

HE COMES

It was the evening of one of the most perfect days in an Indian summer of notable loveliness. In this refulgent weather, to quote Emerson, who knew well what he spoke of, "it was a luxury to draw the breath of life." Free equally from the enervating heat and insects of high summer, and the numbing rigour of the Eastern winter, the days passed in dignified procession, calm and temperate, roseate with the blazing foliage of autumn, and gay with geraniums and marigolds. On our modest pergola there still clung a few ruby-coloured grapes, though the leaves were scattered, and in the beds about our verandah blue cornflowers and yellow nasturtiums enamelled the untidy carpet of coarse grasses that were trying to choke them. Not far away, down by the Episcopal Church, men were playing tennis in flannels on the courts of yellow, hard-packed sand. The intense blue of an Italian sky lent a factitious transparency to the atmosphere, and the tiny irregular shadows that indicated the colossal architecture of New York seemed to float like bubbles in an azure bowl. Across the street, a vacant plot of land, neglected because of imperfect title, was cut diagonally by a footpath leading down to Broad Street, where, out of sight but not of hearing, trolley-cars between Newark and Paterson thundered at uncertain intervals.

It was our custom, as we sat on our verandah during these afternoons, to watch the gradual appearance of familiar figures upon this path. We knew that a few moments after the whistle of the five-twenty had sounded at the grade-crossing down in the valley, certain neighbours who commuted to New York would infallibly rise into view on this path. There was Eckhardt, who lived at five hundred and nine, and spent the day on the fourteenth floor of the Flatiron Building. There was Williams, immaculate of costume, who designed automobile bodies and had an office on Broadway. There was Wederslen, the art-critic of the New York Daily News, a man whom all three of us held in peculiar abhorrence because he persisted in ignoring Mac's etchings. There was Arber, rather short of stature and rather long of lip, an Irishman who, miraculous to state, admired Burns. There was Confield, an Indianian from Logansport, who had been to Europe on a vacation tour (No. 67 Series C., Inclusive Fare $450) and invariably carried a grip plastered with hotel labels to prove it. We had met these men at tennis and at the Field Club, and in our English way esteemed them. They would come up, head-first, so to speak, out of the valley, revealing themselves step by step until they reached the street, when they would acknowledge our salutations by a lift of the hat and a wave of the evening paper, and pass on to their homes. They generally came, too, in the order in which I have given them. Eckhardt was always first, for he did not smoke, and the smoking-cars on the Erie Road were generally behind. And Confield, of course, was likely to be last, for he had his bag.

It was so on the day of which I speak. The deep bay of the locomotive came up on the still autumn air, and a cloud of dazzling white vapour rose like a balloon above the trees and drifted slowly into thin curls and feathers against the blue sky. It was, even in this trifling detail, a homelike landscape, for Bill had told us how, from the square hall window of High Wigborough, you could see the white puffs of invisible trains on the lonely little loopline from Wivenhoe to Brightlingsea.

A few moments, and one by one, and in the case of Wederslen and Williams arm-in-arm, our neighbours hove into view out of the valley, saluted and passed. We noted the unusually friendly attitude of the two. What was Williams up to? we wondered. We knew that Williams, the ignoble designer of tonneaux, laboured under the delusion that he could paint. Of course he could not paint—we were all agreed upon that—but he had shown us various compositions done during vacation time—blood-red boulders and glass-green seas. Was it possible that he was convincing Wederslen that he could paint? We shuddered for Art as we thought of it. Their wives were not friendly, though, so Bill asserted. We placed our hopes for Art on that.

For some moments after they were gone, and Confield with his bag had passed from view down the forest path, we tried to contemplate with stoical indifference the prospect of seeing Williams hailed by the servile and blandiloquent Wederslen as a genius. Had he not said of Hooker that "he was likely, at no distant date, to be seen in all the collections of note? His rare skill with the burin, his delicate feeling for nature——" and so on. Of course we all esteemed Hooker and were glad to see him make good; but really, as Bill remarked, "A man who said Hooker had a feeling for nature would say anything." It was like speaking of Antony Van Dyck's feeling for nature. Hooker's Dutch gardens and Italian ornamental waters, his cypresses like black spearheads, his eighteenth-century precisians with their flowered waistcoats and high insteps, were as far from nature as they could conveniently get. So much for Wederslen. We might have pursued the subject indefinitely had not our attention been drawn abruptly to the path.

He came uncertainly, this new figure, pausing when he was only half revealed, as though in doubt of his direction. He wore a Derby hat, and we saw over his arm a rubber mackintosh. Making up an obviously unsettled mind, he abjured the path and struck straight across towards us, with the evident intention of inquiring the way.

There are many conceits by which men may assert their individuality in dress, even in these days of stereotyped cut. They may adhere by habit or desire to the uniform of their class, they may preserve their anonymity even to a cuff-link, yet in some occult way we are apprised of their personal fancy; we see a last-remaining vestige of that high courage that made their ancestors clothe themselves in original and astonishing vestments. And it is this fortuitous difference, this tiny leak, one might say, of their personality, that stamps them finally as belonging to an immense mediocrity. It is this subtle and microscopic change, a sixteenth of an inch in the height of a collar, a line in the pattern of a scarf, a hair's breadth in the disposition of a crease, that the psychologists of the market-place call distinction, and labour industriously to supply.

But the man who now crossed the street and stood before us bore neither in his apparel nor in his lineaments a single detail by which he could be remembered. In everything, from his black medium-toed boots to his Derby hat of untarnished respectability, from his recently-shaven chin to his steady grey-blue eyes, he betrayed not the slightest caprice which would enable an observer to distinguish him from a particular type. It was as though he had been conscious of all this and had even sought to avoid the most trivial peculiarities. In height, in feature, in dress, he was so ordinary that he became extraordinary. His intention to be unnoticed was so obvious that it predicated, in my own mind at least, a character and possibly an occupation out of the common run.

"Can you tell me," he began in a voice that gave no hint of emotion, "can you tell me if this is Van Diemen's Avenue?"

"Yes," we said all together, studying him the while. "Yes, this is Van Diemen's Avenue."

"Thanks," he replied, and withdrew his foot from our bottom step.

It seemed as though he was about to depart and leave us guessing, when he spoke again.

"Perhaps you know the house I want," he said. "Carville's the name. I," he added as if in an afterthought, "am Mr. Carville." And he looked at us gravely, apparently unaware of the turmoil of curiosity which he had aroused.

Some one—I think it was Mac—pointed to the next house.

"That's it," we managed to say.

For a moment his eyes rested upon it casually.

"Thanks," he said again, and then, "Much obliged." He stepped back to the sidewalk and walked along to the house. None of us can recall exactly what happened when he approached his door, for we were all looking away across the valley, hastily rearranging our chaotic impressions. It is to be presumed that he knocked and was admitted. When we glanced round a few moments later he was gone.

"Great Scott!" murmured Mac, and looked at us in the growing dusk. Bill rose to get dinner.

Throughout the meal we refrained from any comment. Now that he had materialized, there was no reason, in the nature of things, why we should bother our heads any more about him. In the most natural way he had appeared and innocently demolished the photo-play romances we had constructed about him. It was a warning to us to avoid nonsense, in future, when discussing our neighbours. Miss Fraenkel had fared no better. Evidently he was not "held" for something with which his wife had "got away." We were all ridiculously wrong and ought to be ashamed of ourselves. And so we were; avoiding mention of him, and devoting our attention to the fish, for it was Friday, and we kept it religiously.

But as I drank my coffee and listened to that exquisitely mournful barcarolle from the Tales of Hoffmann, the whole episode took on a different aspect. I perceived, as Schopenhauer had perceived a hundred years before me, that our first judgment upon a man or principle is probably the most correct. I saw that I had been carried away by logic and numbers and had discounted my first impression. From the angle at which I now regarded Mr. Carville I could see that, after all, his case presented certain details which we could not as yet account for. Unfamiliar as I was with the life of the sea, I felt instinctively that men who had their business in great waters would bear upon their persons indications of their calling, some sign which would catch one's imagination and assist one to visualize their collective existence. But Mr. Carville had nothing. I passed in mental review the details of his appearance, his blue serge suit, his dark green tie, his greying moustache, clipped short in a fashion that might be American, English, French or German. His voice had been quiet and deferential, but by no means genteel; nor had it any hint of the roystering joviality of a sailor. More than anything else his gait, in its sedate unobtrusiveness, seemed to me utterly at variance with the rolling swagger which we conventionally associate with seamen.

Grant, however, I said to myself, that he looks a truth-telling man. Grant that he is, as his children said, at sea. Surely there is something romantic in this quiet-eyed man being married to such a woman as Mrs. Carville! Surely a man whose children bear names so bright on the rolls of fame must have something in him worthy of admiration! As the barcarolle swelled and died away, I felt this conviction growing within me. I felt certain that so far from demolishing the real mystery, Mr. Carville had only brought it into focus. We had not seen it before. And it promised to be a mystery on a higher plane than the rather sordid affair we had been postulating.

I decided to sleep on my conclusions, however, before broaching the matter to my friends, and having some work to finish for the morning's mail, I went back to my desk. For three hours or so I worked steadily, page after page slipping to the floor as I finished them. My friends did not disturb me, and when I ascended to the studio for a "crack" before retiring, I found the big room in darkness. So! I mused and descended. A brilliant moon threw a dense black shadow in front of the house. The porch was in gloom, but the street was nearly as bright as day. I stood on the verandah for a few minutes, filling a pipe and looking across at the Metropolitan light where it shone serenely on the horizon. As I struck a match I became aware of a figure moving slowly in front of the Carville house, up and down the gravel walk that ran below their verandah. I threw away my match and stepped down into the moonlight, intending to stroll up and down for a while on the flags of the sidewalk. I often find that if I retire immediately from a burst of writing I am unable to sleep for several hours. The pendulum of the mind should be brought to rest quietly and without shock.

I was not surprised when the figure in the shadow stepped out into the moonlight as I approached. What startled me was the undoubted resemblance to myself in figure and mass. We were both small men. Perhaps there was a shade more shoulder-breadth on his side than mine, but there was the same slight droop, the same negligible tendency to stoutness. As I turned the matter over in my mind we came face to face.

"Good evening," we said simultaneously. He waved his pipe, a corn cob, towards the east. "New York!" he remarked, and we stood side by side for a moment in silence. The simple observation seemed to me to imply a susceptibility to the sublimity of the prospect that we had not discovered to any extent among our other neighbours. To them, apparently, New York was no more than London is to Hampstead; they had the suburban sentiment in an acute form. Nevertheless I was somewhat at a loss to continue our conversation. It seemed foolish to neglect such a heaven-directed opportunity to meet this man on his own ground and obtain some light upon his career. How should I begin? Should I say to him, "Look here, it is very nice, no doubt; but we, your neighbours, are simply crazy to know who and what you are?" That might strike him in various ways. He might take offence, and one could not blame him. He might see humour in it, and a proof of the contemptible meanness of human nature. I decided that I lacked courage to blurt out my desire that way. He was so very much like myself that I could not rid myself of the notion that he might prefer a milder way of approach. And as I sorted out my stock of diplomacy he spoke of the matter himself.

"You are a seaman, I understand?" I remarked. He gave me a quick glance.

"I go to sea," he replied, "if that is what you mean. Yes, in the legal phrase of the Board of Trade, I'm a seaman, and my number is Three nine five, eight nine three." He laughed shortly and continued to look out towards New York.

"A picturesque life," I hazarded, regretting my total ignorance of it. Again he looked at me and laughed.

"You think so?" he queried. "You think so?"

"I speak from book knowledge only," I said. "It is usually described in those terms." We began to walk to and fro.

"Well," he admitted unexpectedly, "and so it is. I don't doubt that to anyone just looking at it, you understand, it is as you say, 'picturesque,' But when you have a number like Three nine five, eight nine three, you have another view of it."

"You have been for a long voyage?"

"Oh no," he said; "Mediterranean and back, that's all."

I began to realize something of the man from this. I had no knowledge of the sea, but I certainly had a mind trained by years of observation and reflection to deduce certain definite data affecting human nature. And I realized dimly that a man who regarded a run round the Mediterranean and back across the Atlantic as a trivial episode scarcely worthy of mention, might have views on literature and art radically at variance with my own.

"I should have thought," I remarked, "that you would have made your home there rather than here."

"There's some who do," he said. "Lots of the Anchor Line men do. But personally I'd rather be here."

"It is very like England," I agreed, as he broke in.

"Sure," he said. "I was just thinking as I came up the hill. I come from Hertfordshire myself. Very like the Northern Heights."

"We always think," I answered, "that it is like Essex."

He pondered for a moment, enjoying his pipe.

"Well, it is," he decided. "You mean looking over Staten Island to the sea? Yes, only they're busier here than along Mersea Flats, eh? Oh yes, I used to know that part when I was a boy. There isn't much between Chipping Barnet and Hamford Water that I didn't know in those days."

"You will go back some day?" I said as we turned. A change came over his face, and he put his hand to his chin.

"No," he said. "I'll never go back there. I'm here"—he waved his pipe—"for keeps."

I looked at him in astonishment.

"Why?" I said, a little indignantly. "Are you not an Englishman?"

For a moment he did not reply to the blunt question, but looked down at the flags. His feet were cased in red velvet slippers, I noticed, and they struck me as quite indescribably bizarre in the moonlight. His hesitation was too ominous, heavy with unimaginable complexities. His voice was muffled when he spoke.

"No," he said. "I'm—an alien."

At first I was impressed by the tone more than the words. It was mournful, with a streak of satisfaction in his condition that I felt was assumed.

"You mean," I said at last, "that you intend to take out papers?"

He looked at me queerly.

"How long would it take," he inquired with a smile, "to put in five years' residence, when I'm in the country about three days every two months? No, I don't think I'll bother about papers. When I say I'm here for keeps, I mean those belonging to me."

"There is a question I would like to ask you," I said, tentatively.

"I shall be very glad to answer it if I can," he replied.

"It refers to your little boys."

"Why," he broke in, "they haven't been annoying you, have they? I hope they haven't done that!"

"Not at all. I merely had a curiosity to know why they bear such unusual names."

He smiled.

"They told you their names, did they?"

"They were good enough to commend me for the way I played Indian," I explained, and he gave me another of his quick comprehensive glances.

"It's rather a long story you've asked for," he said.

"I am interested in stories," I put in.

"Beppo said you made pictures," he mused.

"In words," I added.

He paused again. It seemed to be a part of his mode of thinking, this occasional parenthesis of silence. It was almost as though the man were leading me down a vast and dimly-lit corridor, laying his hand at times on various doors, and then withdrawing it, from some mysterious motive, and continuing upon his way.

"An author?" he said, half to himself. "Ah!"

It was borne in upon me that neither a wide experience in common everyday psychology, nor even an exhaustive knowledge of sea-life could adequately cope with the bewildering emotions implicit in that "Ah!" In its way it was the most remarkable thing he had said.

"Yes, if you like," I replied. "I am professionally interested in stories."

He felt in his pocket for matches and as the flame spurted before his face I saw the corners of his mouth betrayed a pucker of amusement. I suddenly felt the absurdity of my position. I had been led to expose myself to ridicule. I might have expected it after the behaviour of his children.

For a moment I was warm!

"You see," he said, looking at his watch, "it's this way. I'm not a very good hand at yarns, but if you like I'll step along to-morrow some time and have a talk. I don't go back to the ship till Sunday night."

"We shall be charmed," I said. "Come in to tea."

"All right," he answered. "I will. It must be nearly eight bells, I should think, twelve o'clock."

I pointed to the Metropolitan Light, glowing a deep red. He regarded it with interest.

"Think o' that!" he said, absently. "Just think o' that. Eight bells!" He roused himself. "Well, good-night to you, sir. I must turn in. I always sleep best in the Middle Watch."

And he laughed as though at some flash of memory and made his way into the darkened house.



CHAPTER VI

HE BEGINS HIS TALE

The work upon which I had been engaged during the evening did not engross my mind that night when I retired. Over and over again I endeavoured to measure the distance I had advanced in knowledge of my neighbour since I stepped out into the moonlight. I wished to realize the exact advantage I would hold over Mac and Bill when we met next morning at breakfast. And that was just what I found myself unable to do. Both of my friends were shrewd enough to smile if I trotted out the startling information that he came from Hertfordshire. Of course, they would say, he must come from somewhere. And if I remarked he had been in the Mediterranean, they would fail to see anything amazing in a sailor having been in the Mediterranean. And then, how was I to convey to them the extraordinary impression he had made upon me by the simple statement that he was an alien? Why, they would exclaim, were not we aliens too? Were not fifty per cent of our acquaintances in the United States aliens? No, it was impossible. They would not understand. And if they would not understand that, how could they be expected to appreciate in all its puzzling simplicity his ejaculation: "An author? Ah!"

It occurred to me with some bitterness that a brutal editor in San Francisco had once complained of my inability to interview people with any success. "God A'mighty! Why the h—l didn't you ask, man!" And to tell the truth, I am not designed by nature for the cut-throat business of interviewing. To stand before a stranger, note-book in hand, and pry into his personal record, always seems to me only a form of infamy midway between blackmail and burglary. There is to me something in any man's personality that is sacred, something before which there should be a veil, never to be drawn aside save in secret places. An effete whim, no doubt. At any rate it explained why I had enjoyed no success as an interviewer, why I had come away from Mr. Carville without extracting from him his age, his income, his position, the names of his employers, his ship, his tailor or his God. Nothing of all this I knew, so ineptly had I managed my chances to obtain it. And yet I felt that, even if I did not possess any concrete morsel of exciting news, I had discovered not only that he had a story, but that he was willing to tell it. And as I fell asleep a conviction came to me that whatever his story might be, however sordid or romantic, I would pass no judgment upon it until I perceived in its genuine significance, the chapter that lay behind that strange utterance, "An author? Ah!"

* * * * *

The next morning I slept late, until past seven in fact. It had ever been an axiom with us that the indolence attributed to the "artistic temperament" was a foolish tradition. Creative power undoubtedly comes late in the day and in the still night-watches; often I had planned a whole book while in bed; but there are many things to do in literature and art besides creation—research, reading, preparing of palettes, writing of letters and so on, that can be better done early. So we breakfasted at half after seven as a rule. I managed to bathe and shave before Mac's reveille sounded on the piano.

As I opened my napkin I saw that Bill had something of importance to impart, and it came out at once.

"He's mending the fence!" she exclaimed, passing the toast.

"And going about it as though he knew what he was doing," added Mac.

I was glad of this discovery of theirs. It would enable me to introduce my own contribution modestly, yet with effect.

"I wonder," I said, "if he would approve of that tree being cut down." Mac stirred in his chair. The daily spectacle of those two little boys hacking slivers from the prostrate tree had been very trying to him.

"I judge not," he said with energy. "A man who——"

"I wish we knew the exact relations between them," I interrupted. "I mean, whether they quarrel at all."

"Of course they do," said Bill without thinking. "All married people do—at times."

Her husband looked down his nose into his egg. I smiled.

"True, since you say it," I replied, "but you must remember that just as no two people look exactly alike, so no two couples live on exactly the same terms. Just as——"

"Oh, what do you know about it?" said Bill. "Trust a bachelor to lay down the law."

"Those who look on—you know," I protested.

"That isn't true in regard to marriage," she retorted, "because unless you are married you don't look on at all, see?"

I saw.

"I am going to speak to him after breakfast," announced Mac. "He seems a very decent sort of chap. I wonder what he is at sea."

"I had quite a little chat with him last night," I began.

"You did!" they exclaimed. I nodded, enjoying their surprise.

"Yes," I said. "I found you were gone to bed when I finished, and so I went out on the flags for a short walk. He was out there doing the same thing."

"Go on!" said Bill.

"He didn't say anything about mending the fence," I remarked.

"Oh goodness! Tell us what he did say," she implored.

"Well, not much. He comes from Hertfordshire."

"He's English then! I thought so," said Mac, relieved.

"He said No," I answered. "That was one of the most curious remarks he made. He said he was an alien."

"Did he, by Jove! So he is; but it's a very strange thing to say," said Mac. Bill regarded me with interest.

"He's going to keep us guessing," she remarked, dolefully.

"No," I said, taking another piece of toast. "He accepted my invitation to tea this afternoon, and he is going to tell us about himself."

After all I had overlooked my most telling item. I might have known that the fact of his visit would prove more thrilling than any gossip coming secondhand from me. They wished to speak with him again, this man who had come upon us so quietly yet so dramatically. We had all become sufficiently American to desire "a good look at him." And when Americans take a good look at you they go over you with a fine tooth comb. They see everything, from a knot in your bootlace to the gold-filling in your teeth. My friends "sat up" as I made my announcement. I felt that, in editorial parlance, I had made a scoop.

"Bully!" said Mac, and Bill, her chin on her hand, looked across at me with approval. After all, again, my lack of enterprise in interrogating Mr. Carville the night before was bearing fruit. It was crediting me with a sportsmanlike reluctance to steal a march on my friends. I had, unconsciously done what we English call "the right thing." I had invited him to tea. Suddenly Bill's eyes became anxious.

"Are they both coming?" she asked.

"I—I don't think so," I faltered. "I can't say exactly why, but I don't think so. You see," I went on, "the reason he offered to tell me about himself was a question of mine about his children. I said their names were curious enough to strike anyone. He said it was a long story. And he offered to step over himself. Now," I felt more certain of myself now, "the story of his children's names may take two directions. If he named them he will not want his wife to hear him tell about it. If she named them, which is not likely, why, he would scarcely take the trouble to come over and tell strangers about it, would he?"

"I'm very glad to hear it," said Bill.

"So am I," I agreed. "I think it is best to get acquainted with families on the instalment plan, don't you?"

"Rather!" said Bill, and held out her hand for my cup.

It was a perfect morning, clear and crisp, and the long sunlit vista of Van Diemen's Avenue tempted us sorely. We went through our daily struggle. Those people who work by rote, who are herded in offices and factories, and who are compelled by the laws of their industries to remain at their posts whether the sun shines or not, often regard the lives of free lances like us as merely agreeable holidays; they would certainly be somewhat staggered to find the enormous will-power involved in resisting the calls of the open road. There are so many subtle arguments in favour of abandoning the desk for just once. "It is such a glorious day, it is a shame to be indoors," "one's head is muggy; a good walk will clear the ideas," or "it doesn't do to stick at it too long, you know: give it a rest." (This when you have not written a line for a week!) And so on. We knew them all, these specious lures to idleness, and strangled them with a firm hand each morning after breakfast. Well we knew that on a dark dismal rainy day we would hear the Tempter saying, "Who could work on a day like this? Leave it until the sun shines in the window. Try that interesting novel you brought home. After all, you know, you must read to see how the accepted masters do it. Read for technique ..."

By nine o'clock we would all be at work.

So it was on this bright morning in October. I remember being rather struck with the excellence of the work of the preceding evening. It was not great work, you may say, not by any means in the category of immortal classics. It was not even signed, being an appreciation of a certain proprietary article in common use and extensively advertised. There was to me a quite indescribable humour in the fact that this essay in admiration was eventually published in French, German, Swedish and Polish, running into a six-figure issue, while my last novel, a sincere piece of literature, hung fire, so to speak, and never got beyond the publisher's preliminary forecast of a thousand copies. Was I not angry? Far from it. I was no puling undergraduate with a thin broad-margined book of verse to sell. The public was at perfect liberty to buy what it pleased. If they wanted my work, the work I loved and toiled to make as perfect as possible, they would get it, all in good time. For the present I was content to wait and do the thing which could be translated into Swedish and Polish, into dollars cash. It is customary, I know, to rail at the American public, to accuse them of a material mania. An artist is better employed, in my humble view, in trying to understand them, for believe me, they are not so vile as the precious litterateurs and others would have us believe. Bitterness is no preparation for sympathetic study. And without sympathy our works, however clever and lovely, are but Dead Sea apples, crumbling to ashes at the touch of a human finger.

It must not be supposed that we had arrived at this way of thinking by a sudden leap. Again, far from it! My friend and I had been undergraduates, and very proud of ourselves into the bargain, long ago in England. But we had travelled since then, in more senses than one. We had known comfort and we had known the mute impressive numbness of despair. We had made "scoops" at times and celebrated them with joyous junketings. Once we had dined at Delmonico's, a meal of which the memory is still an absurd chaos. We had, moreover, confronted America with a blank wall of unyielding British prejudice. We had entrenched ourselves behind our conception of the thing to do and stupidly refused to do anything else. And we had been beaten to our knees. For it meant eventually either submission or flight. And we never had any intention of flight. We had fixed it firmly in our minds that we would return triumphant to England, some day as yet far off. We were aliens, yes; but we meant to win through at last, to make our dream come true; our dream of a cottage, with honeysuckle and roses, "far from the madding crowd."

And so we realized at length that, after all, the country was there before us; that they had not asked us to come; that we might as well do things the way they wanted. All this was sound physic for us. It made us, in the true sense of the word, cosmopolitan, made us broad in culture and stimulated that deep human sympathy and understanding which lay at the root of that impatience with which we awaited the story of our neighbour.

I was typing a letter about three o'clock when I heard Mac's quick step on the stairs and the opening of the door. It is his custom to take advantage of his view of the path from the studio window to forestall the postman, and I took no further notice until I heard the hum of conversation. And so I was the last to appear.

He was standing in the middle of our room, his back to me, his Derby hat in his hand, looking curiously about the walls. I saw his glance held for a moment by the old English clock with its swinging pendulum and weights. It passed on to the chimney-piece loaded with antique silver, bizarre brasses, candle-snuffers and snuff-boxes. It moved over to the bust of Bill that Von Roon had given her when she was married, a miracle of cunningly-arranged shadows. It fell away from water colour and etching without hint of ulterior interest, and came to rest upon the book-shelves. There was more than politeness in his glance at the books, more than mere curiosity. There was, plainly enough, connoisseurship. In the flicker of an eyelid you can tell it. He turned to meet me as I entered the room.

"I'm glad you've come," I said, shaking hands. His clasp was firm, almost athletic. "We tea at four, but I don't think I told you that."

"No," he said, "you didn't. I always have tea at three and it didn't occur to me that the custom might be different."

"Don't apologize," said Bill. "It only takes a minute to make. Do you like it strong?"

He smiled.

"It's the only way I get it, at sea," he said. "Strong! Boiled would be a better word for it."

"We like it strong," said Mac. "Sit down please. Here, I'll take your hat."

He sank back in a chair and looked about him. For the first time we saw him without a hat. A wide head, full over the temples, and with thinning hair on the brow, it was in no wise unusual. The head of a professional man, shall I say? His hands lay palm downward on the arms of the chair, the knuckles white, the broad flat nails imperfectly manicured.

"You've got a snug little place here," he remarked. "A very snug little place. It's very old fashioned. I got quite a start when I stepped into—into the room from the street. Like the cottages in England. Art curtains, too!"

The tea came in then, and Bill offered him a cup. I think I was a little disappointed in his remarks. They were like his first impression on me the day before, so commonplace, so laboriously undistinguished that again the conviction was forced upon me that it was a pose. Had I expected too much? Was he merely a self-satisfied egoist, clever enough to perceive our interest and impose upon it? Bill endeavoured to clear the air. The mention of "art curtains" always made Mac restive.

"Do you like pictures?" she asked.

He gave her one of his quick glances.

"Some," he replied. "I believe, if I'd been taught, that I could have done something in that line," and he pointed with his saucer towards a water-colour, a drawing of the Golden Gate from Russian Hill.

I hardly knew what to make of this new development. I really did not believe he had looked at it. Moreover the drawing was not clamant with noisy daubs to attract the attention. It was not even recognizable as a view of the Golden Gate. It was a study of colour-combination, in an unusually high key, of interest to artists, but not to the public. Only the cognoscenti had remarked that picture before.

"You like it?" I said, taking it down and handing it to him.

"Ah!" he said, setting his cup and saucer on the floor. "Yes, that's it, that's it." He studied it. "That's what I should have liked to tackle. Sugar-plums, eh?"

We looked at him in astonishment, and he assumed an attitude of apology.

"I beg pardon," he said. "What I meant was it reminded me of old Turner, you know, messing about with coloured sugar-plums."

"A colour-scheme?" said Mac, light dawning in his puzzled face.

"That's it, that's the word: colour-scheme," said Mr. Carville. "I'd forgotten the word." And he handed the drawing back. "You wonder at a seafaring man coming out here to live?"

"It's a very healthy district," I suggested.

"Mrs. Carville don't like New York, that's all," he said, simply. "Personally, I shouldn't have bothered. But she's quite right."

"I should think it was better for the children too," said Bill.

He nodded vigorously, packing the tobacco into his pipe.

"Fresh air," said Mac, who slept out on the porch half the year.

"Oh there's plenty of fresh air in Atlantic Avenue," he said. "I had something else in mind." He looked thoughtful, and then his face lighted up with an extremely vivid indignation. It died away again in a moment, but it transfigured him. "Automobiles," he added.

We nodded, understanding him perfectly. We had seen them, in New York as in Brooklyn, careering at maniacal speed among the children at play. Bill, who loved children almost as much as flowers, had come in one day in Lexington Avenue, white and sick, and told us brokenly of something she had seen. So we nodded and he, seeing that we understood, said no more.

"Have you lived in America long?" I inquired.

"Both the kids were born here," he replied. "Yes, that's nearly eight years since we came. You see—but it's a long story. I don't know whether you'd be interested——"

Bill rose.

"Let us go outside," she said. "It's beautifully warm."

We went out.

"You must take the Fourth Chair," said Bill, looking at us.

We explained to him the legend of the Fourth Chair.

"You see," I added, "we were expecting you. There is fate in this."

For a long time he sat quietly looking across the valley, as though pondering something.

"I think I might as well begin at the beginning," he said at last, "and work up to the kids' names gradually. Though as a matter of fact I could tell you in two words the reasons for giving them such un-English names, it wouldn't explain how I feel. And that I take it is what you are after?"

"Begin at the beginning," I said.

"So I will. I told you I was born at sea. My father was a merchant skipper of Boston. I don't remember him very well, for he died when I was seven, but I have a vague sort of an idea that he was a big man with big dark eyes and a great nose like the beak of a bird. He had run away to sea when—well, Napoleon was Emperor of the French when he ran away to sea. Sailors had pigtails and all the rest of it. His brothers did the same. At one time, in the 'sixties, there were six skippers ploughing the ocean, all Carvilles, all big black-whiskered men. You may hear of them yet in the ports out East.

"My father married four times. There was one peculiarity, or fatality if you like, about the Carvilles, and that was their failure to beget sons. Daughters came right along all the time. I have fourteen cousins, all married, and all got boys! The first three wives my father had only produced two daughters, who died before their mothers. You can understand that those six big men took it badly there were no sons. When the third wife died, childless, my father had given up the sea for a while and had invested in a ship-yard at St. John, New Brunswick. It was there that he met my mother.

"I can't go into details I never knew, so all I can say is that my mother was French Canadian. They had a big farm away up the Petitcodiac River and the girls used to come down to St. John to finish an education that began in Moncton and really ended, in my mother's case, in London, England.

"They built ships in those days in St. John, and some of the best were my father's work. As I said, I don't remember him very well, but you will understand how I felt when one day, about nine years ago, we put into a little Spanish port for coal, and they made us fast to an old wooden hulk in the harbour. As we came round her stern I was leaning over the side and I saw the brass letters still on her square counter, Eastern Star, St. John, New Brunswick. That was one of my father's finest models. Pitch pine he made her of, and she's beautiful yet, for all her disgrace. I climbed aboard of her while the Corcubion women were trotting to and fro with the coal baskets, and looked round the poop. There was the cuddy as good as ever, teak frames, maple panels, pine flooring. That old hulk brought my old father before me as no daguerreotype could do. There was his name cut on the beam, John Carville. It may seem absurd to you people, but do you know, I realized then, as I looked up and saw my father's name on that beam, nearly smothered with countless coats of varnish, I realized how a young man of family feels, a Cecil, say, a Talbot or a Churchill, when he sees his ancestors' names in the history books. My father had done something, he was something. I don't know anyone who can better that title: a builder of ships.

"And my father did more than that, he sailed them and owned them. So far he had been under the Union flag, but this time, when he married my mother, and his finest masterpiece, the Erin's Isle, was anchored in St. John Harbour ready for sea, the Red Ensign was flying at the gaff."

"Did your mother go too?" asked Bill.

"Surely! you think that strange? Well, it was that or a life away at the back of everything; life on a farm, with a visit once a year to St. John. You like the country, don't you? Yes, but if you'd been down in the back-woods, if you'd lived in the thrifty way French Canadians have picked up from the Nova Scotians, and improved, if you were young and wanted to see something, you'd risk your soul to get away from it. You think a woman would have an awful life at sea. My mother jumped at it. She married a man who was sailing as skipper before she was born, and jumped at it! Taking everything into consideration, I don't blame her. You see, she had ambition, my mother had. Her education had been good enough, and she wanted to find a sphere where she could use it."

"And so she went to sea?" said Bill in gentle sarcasm. Bill's aversion to the sea amounts almost to malevolence. She is a bad sailor.

"For the time being, and to see the world," said Mr. Carville. "She had seen nothing, remember. Well, she saw it. They were away five years. You can imagine my father's feelings when the first child was a girl. She was born off the Ladrone Islands in the Pacific on the way to Hong Kong. I suppose he got over the disappointment somehow, for I never heard my mother say anything about quarrels except on the subject of living ashore. I told you my mother had ambitions. She wanted to live in England and have an establishment. But my father couldn't see the use. If she wanted to live ashore, he argued, why couldn't she live in Hong Kong or Bombay or Colombo until he was ready to retire? She would see him just as often. No, she had no intention of doing that. She saw exactly how much ice a skipper's wife cut in a community of skippers' wives. She was after higher game. She settled it finally that if she couldn't live in London, she'd stay aboard the ship all her life.

"She got her way, but not all at once. One voyage she left the ship in Bombay and travelled across India, rejoining at Calcutta. Then she lived in Antwerp a good while, but got sick of it and shipped again when the ship sailed for Callao. That was the last of her voyages, my mother's I mean. For all I know the Erin's Isle swims yet. My sister was drowned and I was born before she dropped her anchor in London River."

"Drowned!" said Bill; "a little baby?"

"Going ashore in Callao," said Mr. Carville, turning to her, "there was a 'roller' started. I believe it's caused by the sea-bed shifting; slight earthquake in fact. The roller was a big wave and struck the ship's boat as they were rowing across the harbour. Accidents will happen, no matter how careful you are."

"Yes," we said quietly, "they will."

"They went from Callao to Brisbane and loaded again in Melbourne for home. My mother used to say she thought they would never get round the Cape of Good Hope. My father had done the voyage once in sixty-two days, almost a record; but this time everything went dead wrong. They were driven as far as the Crozets, somewhere down near the South Pole, I believe. The grub gave out, and even my mother had to eat bread from corn that was ground in the coffee mill. The crew got restless and sulky. I've often tried to imagine it, the Skipper and his two mates, talking it over in the cuddy, keeping the men working to stop their thinking, running for days under reefed courses and double reefed topsails. And all the time with something else on his mind, something that materialized finally, into me!

"My mother told me that my father nearly went crazy with joy when I was born one Sunday morning, 18 south, 21 west, at seven bells on the starboard watch. They were in the trade then, spanking along almost due north for Fernando Noronha. It was rum for all hands that morning, almost the only soft thing left on the ship, and a little tea. The tea came in handy for their pipes, my mother told me. Poor chaps! They were dying for a smoke. Well, I have always got a good deal of satisfaction from knowing everybody was glad I came into the world. My father was dancing mad to get home and tell all the folks that the curse was lifted. He promised my mother anything; a home in London was one thing. He said he would quit the sea, for another. And he kept his word too. He was going on fifty-five, and had been at sea for thirty-eight years. Think of that! I've been at it for fifteen years now, and it seems an infernally long time. Thirty-eight years!

"So they settled in England. I don't know whether you people can see it plainly, but if you think a little you will realize how strange those two felt in London, with their Saratoga trunks, their sea habits and their American prejudices. Can you?"

He looked from one to the other as we sat there, our chairs twisted a little so that we could see his face. The question was a shrewd one. I remember wondering if he was aware how vividly it brought back to our minds our first few weeks in San Francisco, our mistakes, our petulant anger with strange habits, our feeling of awful homesickness. Again we nodded silently.

"For a time they were up against it, you would say," he went on, "and they didn't dare to move away from their lodgings in the East India Dock Road. It was natural for my father to think he ought to live near the ships. The custom of living in the suburbs, commuting as they call it here, hadn't begun in the seventies. It was my mother who fired his ambition to live further out. It would have been all right and everything might have been different if his ambition hadn't been fired in another direction at the same time.

"My father had done well on the whole. He had saved for years and kept his money in banks or in ships, which he understood. But now, when the Erin's Isle was sold and he found himself worth about fifty thousand dollars, he began to invest in all sorts of queer ventures. He wanted to double his fortune before he died. Others had done it, men he met in Leadenhall Street and on the Baltic; why shouldn't he? You see, he had got hold of the masculine part of my mother's ambition all right. She wanted to have an establishment, like a lady; he wanted to found a family in England. The money he was to make was for me. I was, he had settled, to be an engineer. He saw, that with steel coming in, engineering was to be the great gold-mine of the future. So he would provide the capital by which I was to build up a huge fortune. The Carvilles were to be big people, understand; 'my son was to be Prime Minister some day,' Humph!"

There was no bitterness in the exclamation, only a veiled irony, a detached amusement, at this memory of a dead ambition. We did not interrupt.

"They moved out just a little way, to Mildmay Park. You must remember that my father had no friends outside of business friends, and he had no idea that he would gain anything by moving west. My mother disliked what she saw of Kensington and Bayswater, and they thought in their simplicity that places with names like Mildmay Park, Finsbury Park, and finally Oakleigh Park, were good enough to begin on. Each move was a little further out, a little bigger house and a little higher rent until at Oakleigh Park, when I was six years old, it was a big semi-detached villa, with a garden and tennis-lawn and professional people for neighbours. That year my brother was born and my father began to die.

"You will laugh, I suppose, at the folly of it, but in her own way, my mother was setting up to be a fine lady. We had a cook and housemaid, and a nurse for me, and fine things I learned from her! We had a hired landau on Saturday afternoon to go drives in, a pew in the church, and sometimes people to dinner. She even got my father to send to Dublin to find out the Carville ancestry and coat-of-arms. She did, that's a fact! So you see, she understood perfectly what was meant in England by keeping up a position. As I said, if my father had not got a sort of mania for turning his money over, the scheme might have gone through.

"He began to die when I was not quite six, and he went on dying and at the same time investing money until I was nearly eight. Imagine it! A great big man, as irritable as a child, slowly rotting away inside with cancer and two helpless little children, one a baby. All the time it was doctor after doctor, each one recommending a different cure; all the time it was investment after investment, the estate getting more and more entangled. He went to Baden one autumn and came home worse. He tried Harrogate in the spring, but it was no use. He came back, went to bed and never rose from it. Mind you, all the time the cancer was eating his body, this other cancer was at his mind. He plunged into the craziest schemes for getting twenty per cent. interest. Nothing my mother could say was able to make him see the madness of it. She wanted him to buy land, but he said no one but a fool would buy land unless they had a fortune to keep it up. At last, one January, it was over and done with. He died, and we had a grand funeral, and the real business of life began for us.

"For me it took a shape that I never got used to for all the years I was kept at it—school. For the life of me I can't see what use it was to me or to anyone else. What does a child learn at school that's of any use to him? You'll think I am talking like an ignorant fool, I dare say, but hear me out. Between eight and seventeen I went to six different schools. The country in those days was spotted with them. Some were called colleges, some academies, one was called an 'Ecole' of something or other. Each one I went to had a different badge, a different coloured tassel, a different set of rules and subjects. Barring the last one, which was down in Essex, near Maldon, they were simply swindles. A mile from our house was a board-school, but it would not have been keeping up our position to send me there. I learned to read and write, but, Great God! curiosity will make a child do that. If he isn't curious to learn what's the use of him learning? He just forgets it, as I forgot it, as you did too very likely, forgot it and learned it again when you needed to. A child ought to be outdoors learning the names of flowers and trees and birds. I know what I'm talking about, mind! You may fancy that if a boy is going into the professions as I was to go, as I did go, he ought to be schooled. Well, when I entered my profession at seventeen, I had to begin at the bottom for all my schooling. I know as much of 'professions' as most men, and I say of schools, I have no faith in them. The men who teach them know nothing. They're frauds and they know it. All that these schools did for me was to teach me the importance of keeping up a position.

"Twenty per cent! Twenty per cent! The madness of it! The holes and corners he had rushed into, in his frantic hunt for twenty per cent! A bank in Australia, a railroad in Ecuador, a sailing ship that never by any chance sailed into prosperity, a ginger-beer works in Denmark, a cement works in Spain, a foolish concern which proposed to earn vast sums by buying moribund bad debts, a drydock in Japan, and a lunatic-scheme for shoeing horses without nails! This last invention, if I remember rightly, was to fasten them with steel suspenders and a kind of cuff-button over the pastern! And we couldn't even leave the infernal things to die of inanition. Not content with paying no dividend, their familiar demons used to wake up and demand more capital. Calls! I would come home from school for my vacation and find my mother nearly crazy over another call. We were so simple that at first we paid them, and my father's old 'business friends' (he hadn't any others that I ever heard of) saw no objection. Humph! When I read in novels how a father's friends help the hero and heroine, succouring the widow and the fatherless, I must smile. I recall the days of our storm and stress, when those sleek and slippery wolves, the 'business friends' of my father, sat round waiting for my poor distracted, gallant-hearted mother to stumble and stagger in her struggle with those wild-cats of investments. Wild cats! Bengal tigers were a better name for them! But she didn't! She won out and defied the whole caboodle, as she called them when she was roused. She won out, or I shouldn't be here now, maybe. She was a mother fighting for her offspring, and many a shrewd knock they had from her. And the 'business friends' slunk away and we've never seen them since. They talk about the romance of big business. What about the tragedy of the small business? What about the dark and dirty meannesses of business? What about the 'business friend,' watching, watching for the weaker ones to fall? What sort of romance is there in battles between wolves and women, in wars without chivalry? Mercy? Consideration for the weak and helpless? Knightly courtesy towards women? You won't find any of them in business, I'm afraid. I remember often sitting in the room with my book, a school-boy on his holidays, while some smug specimen of the business-friend variety sat explaining and domineering over my mother, who did her best to understand. Perhaps she was difficult and stupid. It isn't every woman—or man either—who can keep a grasp on the details of banks and railroads and cement and ginger-beer and marine insurance and company-law and all the other tarradiddles that were going to yield twenty per cent and didn't yield twenty cents! I used to wonder if these men's own wives would be as intelligent as my mother in similar circumstances. Humph! I saw those ladies in one or two instances when they were widowed and had to face the world without a man. I was astounded. To see those proud big-bosomed women, with their red faces and narrow hearts and silly conversation, collapse and go down in ruin before the blasts of adversity! To see them, who had tried in their patronizing way to get us to give up our home and go into apartments, selling up and letting apartments themselves! Them! They hadn't a tenth of the fight in them my little colonial mother had, for all their big bosoms and tall brag about their independence and the fine offers they had when they were single. Some of the men too were in misfortune after a while. Some disaster sent up a big wave which washed them off their little rafts. I used to wonder what became of them. One I know died of heart-trouble. He was never troubled with his heart when he sat in our parlour laying down the law to a harassed widow and trying to get her money into his own rotten little business. Oh, it used to make my heart burn within me; but what could I do? All very fine for boys in novels to make vows to get the fortune back. Humph! You might as well try to get butter off a dog's tongue, or capture the steam from the kettle. Its gone! Besides, I always had a dumb dislike of business. I used to moon. We were so troubled with business-troubles we had no time to live. We never really got to know each other. I used to think my mother was hard and unsympathetic because her view of life wasn't mine—as if it could be. It was a miserable tangle. There was my father, whose love for us made him leave us that horrible legacy of investments. And my mother was so busy providing for us she had no leisure to love us. And my brother and I were so different in temper and age and inclination we simply ignored each other. Love? It's easy to talk; but think of the innumerable gradations of it! Think of how incompetent most of us are to express it! I used to hear the servants use the word, and I would wonder. I used to read stories about it, and wonder still more. Little Lord Fauntleroy.... Humph!

"Somehow or other, my mother did eventually get things straight. There wasn't much to bring up a future Prime Minister on, and besides, there was my brother. He took more after my father than I did. I was mother's boy, but he was a dark daring little devil without much respect for either of us. I don't know quite how it began, but between us there grew a feeling that can't be called brotherly love. Perhaps he realized that, according to my mother's ideas of founding a family, I was to be first and he was to be—nowhere. As it happened this was not just. He was clever from the very first. I was to be an engineer, and he was to do—well, anything that came along. But he had the talent for engineering; I hadn't. I liked it, same as any boy does, but while I couldn't do a simple division sum without making a mess of it, he could do it in his head, and standing on his head for that matter. Whatever he tried, that he could do, whereas my range has always been quiet and limited. I liked reading. He never seemed to be in the house long enough to read anything, but he knew more than I did. He does now."

"Where is he now?" I asked. He laughed.

"That's more than I can say. I'll get to that presently. What I want you to understand is the feeling we brothers had for each other. He didn't detest me, you know. He didn't take the trouble to do that. He simply laughed at me. He made friends with board-school boys and even errand-boys. One day my mother saw him out in the baker's cart driving it round the neighbourhood. It was a sore humiliation for her, I'm afraid. He didn't care. There were girls, too, even when he was only ten or eleven. Humph!

"All this time I was growing up in this sort of life, the life of the professional classes. When I left school, at seventeen, neither my mother nor I had much idea of the way a young gentleman became an engineer. She had no relatives in England, my father's brothers were either at sea or dead, and my father's business friends dropped away when he died, a way business friends have, I've noticed since. We were aliens still as far as real friends went. And then one day we saw an interview in a paper called the Young Pilgrim, one of those mushy papers for young people that do a lot of harm, in my opinion. It was an interview with Sir Gregory Gotch, the great engineer. My mother, who had a good deal of practical enterprise, decided to write to him and ask him. I've often wondered what he thought of that letter. It ran something like this: Mrs. Carville presents her compliments to Sir Gregory Gotch, and would be obliged to him if he would inform her of the best way to article her son (aged seventeen) to the engineering profession in a manner suitable to his position. Something like that. You can understand from that that my mother had grasped the principle of gentility all right. It went down, too, for in a few days we had an answer, in which the great man gave the names of three or four firms in London that he recommended as reliable and old-established. We selected one, and apparently Sir Gregory's name was an open sesame there, for we had an invitation to go into the city and see them at once.

"We went, the gentlemanly youth and his ladylike mother, and saw the heads of the firm. We discovered then, that there were two ways of learning engineering, an easy way and a hard way. People say there's no royal road to learning. Like most proverbs, it's a lie. There's always a royal road, if you happen to be king of enough money. I might be an ordinary apprentice or a special pupil. If I was apprenticed I should have to start at six o'clock in the morning and work just like the men. I would stay in one shop for seven years and be turned out an expert mechanic. And I would have to wait six months for an opening, as they were full-up. If I came as a pupil, however, I would be allowed to spend so much time in each shop, including the offices; I could start at nine o'clock in the morning and finish the whole business in three years. The premium was nine hundred dollars, and I could start that minute. They didn't seem to care how soon they got that nine hundred dollars.

"We talked it over in the train. Of course, I was all for the royal road and had plenty of good arguments in favour of it. What I want you to notice is that my mother was in favour of it, too! Think of it. She had been brought up in a hard school. She knew what it was to live sparingly and how useful early discipline was. She had told me often that all great men had a hard struggle. Therefore, how could I be a great man if I didn't have a hard struggle? And yet she was so obsessed with this notion of gentility that she deliberately gave me a soft time. She paid out three hundred dollars every year for three years....

"That time was what you might call a comedy of errors. I am not going to admit that I idled, for it is not true. I was ambitious. Since I was to be an engineer I went at it bald-headed. I went to polytechnics and night-schools, I spent whole nights in study, and did everything that any young chap could do. The whole of my efforts did not amount to a row of rivets. Why? I was up against the gentility again. I met the professional classes face to face.

"There were three other chaps there as pupils, and it so happened that they were every one from the great public schools. One was from Haileybury, one from Eton, and another from Winchester. When they found I was not one of them they ragged me, of course, which was good and proper. I often think the ragging in public schools is one of the few useful things they do there. When these men found I intended to study my profession they thought I was stark mad. They were all nice young fellows and had money coming to them. Why should they bother? They thought I ought to look at it in the same light. Eventually I did. It was three to one. I found out that any amount of study and genuine merit would not carry me along in a profession. It was all well enough to be an engineer; but the main thing was to be a gentleman. Gradually I dropped the study, took afternoons off to go down west and began to worry my mother for more money.

"So it went on for the three years, my mother patiently waiting for me to get through my time and start in earnest as a professional man. My brother was at school, the one near Maldon, and was giving her a lot of trouble. I only saw him during the vacations. He was a big fellow, while as you see, I'm rather on the small side. I don't know that that should cause anybody any amusement! But because I was twenty and he was thirteen and nearly as tall as I was, he was for ever laughing. It seemed to him a huge joke. And as I thought about it the idea came to me that even nature was on his side and against me. It almost seemed as though she'd not only given him the brains, but the stature to be the great man my father and mother longed for. He was good-looking too, I remember, even then. My mother had to pack off a servant that vacation, a silly giggling little girl.

"I couldn't very well say anything to him, because I was getting into hot water myself for spending money. And when he wrote in mid-term for an extra sovereign, my mother blamed me for setting him a bad example. Lord! I didn't have a sovereign a year when I was thirteen. Times had changed.

"I had been drifting along for some time, expecting when my time was up to be put on the staff, as was usual with pupils. They usually gave us a job until we could use our influence to get an appointment somewhere. But in my case it didn't happen so. The day my three years' term was up, a beautiful spring day, the junior partner informed me that I could consider myself finished, and handed me a reference that, for all the use it was, might have gone into the waste-paper basket then and there.

"I was staggered. I had no idea of how to get a job. Why had I been pushed out? Simply because the firm had found out I had no influence with Sir Gregory Gotch, no standing socially at all. I was an alien in their ranks. I went out of that office with all the externals of a gentleman and a public-school boy, but inwardly an outsider as you may say. One thing I had though, and that was the firm conviction that 'pull' and not merit counted. I had to get some one to 'influence' a job in my favour. It would not have been gentlemanly to answer an advertisement!

"My mother thought at once of one of my uncles, who had retired from the sea and was now a marine superintendent in Fenchurch Street. I called to see him; but he was abroad attending to a damaged ship. I think it was a month before I happened to meet the Winchester boy who had been in the works with me. Quite by accident it was. Let me see now——"

Mr. Carville paused again, and leaning over to one of the geranium tubs knocked his pipe out. Suddenly he laughed.

"Why," he said, "I'm telling you the whole story."

"That's what we want you to do," I said, and the others nodded.

"The trouble is, you know," went on Mr. Carville, "one thing leads to another. You can't understand what I am without knowing how my brother and I came to be so—antagonistic. And to explain that it's necessary to show you how I grew up in this professional, easy-going, snobby atmosphere and took it all in, while he, my brother, cut out his own course and went his own way in defiance of everything. I remember now! I saw that Winchester chap—his father was a wine-merchant and Master of the Tinkers' Company—at Lord's. I had nothing to do, and instead of hunting round to get a job, I went to Lord's to see the cricket. There was old Belvoir clumping away at the nets. Engineering! Pooh! He had eight hundred a year his aunt left him—catch him practising as an engineer. He was going on a tour of all the Mediterranean watering-places with an M.C.C. team. Well, we had lunch in the pavilion, and I mentioned in a jolly sort of way that I'd been jounced out of the office. He said it was 'a bally shame,' Oh, I did envy that chap his eight hundred a year! Life seemed to him one grand, sweet song. Cricket, Riviera, dances, clubs, country houses, everything. He was fenced in on every side, safe from the vulgarity of the world. He was hall-marked—a public-school man. He was a citizen of his world, I was an alien. He was rich. I had not even a savings-bank book.

"I was going away after the match when I discovered he had been thinking about me. That was Belvoir all over. He was a gentleman, and a gentleman to my mind is like an artist in one thing only, he is born—and then made. That was Belvoir. He had privileges as an English gentleman, but he had also duties. We had been together in the shop as pupils; that gave me a claim on him. He said he had an uncle in Yorkshire who was chairman of an engineering firm, and he would write to him. More than that, he did write and I got an appointment in their London office in Victoria Street. Good old Belvoir! Remember Spion Kop? That was the last of Belvoir. Lord's, Riviera, clubs—Spion Kop....

"I settled down into that berth in Victoria Street as a cat settles into a cushion. I was warm, comfortable, well-paid, well-dressed and had all I wanted in reason. I lived at home and commuted to the city every day, travelling first class, living first class. I settled down. I was on the way to what my mother and father had in view, a comfortable position.

"My brother was at school, of course, down near Maldon. I never really got hold of my mother's private opinion of her second son. It was a mystery to me why she gave him so much pocket-money, I came to the conclusion afterwards that since she considered it her duty to give me a good start and put by all she could for my capital in business, there would be very little later on for my brother, so she was giving him tips now instead. She was able to say, 'I never stinted you at school, Francis,' It might have been better for him if she had. And yet, I don't know. I've come to think that men like my brother go their own road anyhow. Their hereditary nature is so strong that environment makes no difference, you might say.

"The main difference between us, when I was twenty-two and he was fifteen, was the subject of women. That sounds strange, I suppose. But go back. What did you know about women at fifteen? Or about yourself? My brother knew no more, but he acted on the little he did know, we were afraid. Especially we who grow up in such a social life as I have been talking of; we are afraid. My brother was never afraid of anything. If he wants a thing he makes one bound and grabs it. If he hates a thing he makes another bound and hits it. I've seen a man flinch just because my brother looked at him. As for women, humph! He had only to hold up his hand.

"Now I don't offer it as a proof of virtue, but at twenty-one I had not bothered with girls much. I will explain in a minute why this was the case. For the same reason I did not smoke or play cards. Let me get back to my brother.

"One mid-term my mother got a letter from the head-master saying he regretted that he had been under the painful necessity of expelling Francis Carville from the school. He had been caught flagrante delicto, as the old chap said, and one of the maids had been dismissed. You can imagine how a thing like that upset my mother. Old Colonial morality was pretty strict I have read, and in any case when these things happen in your own family it is very different from reading about them in the Press. But what raised our worry still higher was the curious fact that although he had been expelled and put on the London train at Maldon, he hadn't turned up."

There was another pause as Mr. Carville struck a match. It was nearly dark and we watched his face reflecting the glow. Suddenly Bill realized the time and rose.

"Won't you stay to dinner?" she asked.

"No thank you," he said. "Mrs. Carville's going into Newark this evening, I believe, and we're going to take the boys to a show." He rose. "I must get back. Good-night."

"Come in and finish your story," said Mac.

"All right. Good-night and thank you." He lifted his hat and stepped off the porch.



CHAPTER VII

DIAPORESIS

The discussion at dinner that evening was unexpectedly animated. We all had our theories to propound, our notes to compare and our criticisms to offer. To this I contributed my share, but reserved a conclusion to which I had been approaching all through the tale. I wished to submit it to the tests of coffee and music, to become more familiar with it before I exposed it to Bill's shrewd scrutiny and Mac's sardonic judgment.

To my surprise they insisted upon the strangeness of the story.

"To my mind," I said, "the story can scarcely be called strange, so far."

"I wonder where his brother got to after he was expelled," said Bill.

"Do you think Cecil's man is the brother?" asked Mac.

"You mean interesting," I continued.

"Well," said Mac, "interesting if you like. That don't make it any the less strange. Is Cecil's man——?"

"The really strange part of this man's story," I declared, oracularly, "is the fact that he is telling it; mark that! And a stranger thing still is the way he is telling it!"

"Ex cathedra!" said Mac, sarcastically.

"Explain it all over again," said Bill.

I did so, but they saw no brilliance in my explanation. They were artistic, but not artistic enough to appreciate the nuance of the story-telling art. Perhaps this is nothing against them. Each to his trade. And yet—sugar-plums!

It pleased my friend that evening to undertake the rendering of a work which, unfortunately, can only be butchered on a piano. Of all Wagner's music the Walkueren Ride is least adapted to our homely instrument. Nevertheless the wild clatter, the exciting crepitation of the treble, the thunderous booming of the bass, and above all the tremendous crash with which it ends, always stimulates me to fresh mental effort. I saw plainly, as I listened, that my surmise was correct. I saw that I had no need to wait for the explanation of the phrase: "An author? Ah!" I saw, in short, that Mr. Carville, whatever he might be in the eyes of his wife, his brother, or of the world, was a potential artist. As I recapitulated to myself the various points in his tale, the careful balancing of his narrative with sententious criticism of life, the occasional fiction, to give verisimilitude to trivial events (the incident of Belvoir for example), and particularly his abrupt departure in the dusk, leaving us guessing, I felt certain that for me his tale would have a denouement of peculiar interest. Already I perceived the deliberate attempt of the man to convey the obscure and rare emotion which dominated his intellectual life.

Afterwards, in the studio, I suggested that the story of Turner's sugar-plums might throw some light upon Mr. Carville's story.

"How?" said Mac, who is reluctant to see profane hands touch the master-colourist's memory. I explained again.

"He is taking a lot of romantic episodes, mixing them up, adding a little imaginary landscape and offering it to us," I said. "We asked for a story. We shall have it, says he."

"He's such an ordinary looking chap," began Mac. Bill laughed.

"So am I," I retorted with a grin.

"You know what I mean," he protested. "I meant ordinary in voice and general tone. But if what you say is true he must be a damn clever chap."

"An artist," I agreed.

"I can't make him out," said Bill, sewing busily. "What in the world has all this to do with his children? I want to know where they met."

"So you will, dear lady, never fear," I said, smiling. "I think Mr. Carville understands your desire perfectly."

"Oh, I know I'm a very simple person——" she began.

"By no means," I cried. "Mr. Carville would never suggest such a thing. But think for a moment! Is it not a fair guess that a man like our neighbour, who has had such a varied career, who can divine my interest in him as an author, and Mac's as an artist, will be able to fathom the reason why you watch him with a tense and silent stare?"