Mr. Carville put the two letters in a wire clip and offered me a cigar.

"Now you can see for yourself," said he, "where I live." He laughed. "I'm one of the few people who haven't got a bad word to say of the Standard Oil Co. They give me more cubic feet of private space, bigger cabin space, and better food than any shipowner across the water. They give me any mortal thing for my engines except time to overhaul them. The newspapers tell me they're a blood-sucking trust battening on the body-politic, and so on. Personally ..." and Mr. Carville drew the stopper from a square bottle, "personally, I find them very decent people to work for."

I sat looking at him for some time as he busied himself with a drawer which contained, he assured me, an apollinaris. It struck me that though he had gained in certain external trappings of the mind since entering his room, he had ceased to appear to me as a heroic figure. Even the perception which had appreciated the grandeur of New York, the wit which had connected St. George with San Giorgio Maggiore, seemed to me incongruous with the present phase of his character. Quite possibly I had been so drilled in hatred of Standard Oil that I unconsciously revolted from the notion that any good could come out of that protean enterprise! And yet, when I reflected, I could not but wonder whether, after all, he, in his quiet efficiency, his sober sense, and his deliberate renunciation of the glory of romance, was not as logical a product of our modern age as the corporation he served.

"You serve both God and Mammon," I remarked as the soda-water splashed into the glass. He nodded, smiling.

"Yes," he said, "or rather let us call it rendering unto Caesar. After all, something must bend if you are going to make ends meet. Caesar," he added, lifting up his glass, "isn't such a bad proposition when you have a family to provide for."

I agreed that this was so and scanned the books on the shelves. They at least were a noble company, their gold and green and blue broken by the plain yellow paper backs of Italian books. Shakespeare was there and St. Francis of Assisi; Fors Clavigera in a cabinet edition; Symonds' Renaissance and Pater in wide-margined dignity. Tucked in corners, too, were books in that quaint pocket edition of the Bibliotheque Nationale: Rabelais, in five volumes, Beaumarchais' Memoirs, Rousseau, Scarron's Travesty of Virgil and that extraordinary work of genius, The Maxims of La Rochefoucauld. As I turned them over I saw on their pages the purple rubber-stamps of some bookseller in Tunis, Bizerta, Tangier, and other places even more obscure. I had a vision of the man making his way, in some perspiration, through the press of Arabs and Moors to the little shop under the arches. I saw him scanning the shelves, the Derby hat pushed back, the vest open, the thumb and finger pinching the lower lip.... I turned to him with a worn copy of Heine in my hand.

"I think," I said, "I must fit out an expedition, to go and dredge the Java Sea for that manuscript you threw overboard."

"No," he replied, settling in his chair. "It wouldn't be worth it."

"We don't often find a man who could do it," I said.

"That's because they lack balance. The mistake artists and literary people make is, they think that because a thing is priceless, we can't do without it. I think it's a mistake. Someone pays half-a-million dollars for a Turner, say. Well, even if it was burnt up, lost overboard, what of it? It can be done again."

"Do you think so?" I asked. I was glad Mac did not hear this.

"Certainly!" replied Mr. Carville. "Everything's been done, which is a sound argument for supposing it can be done again. There's plenty of men doing much better than they did in olden times. I can't see much sense in the theory that because a picture is old it's a masterpiece, and because it's new it's junk. We ought to take longer views. How do we know what the youngsters are going to do?"

"That indeed is on the knees of the gods," I said as I put the Heine back on the shelf. I looked at my watch.

"I must be off to Pleasant Plains," I said. "If you are not going out at once, I should like to return in the afternoon; but I must run now."

"I expect we'll be bunkered and out by tea-time," he said, rising. "Still, some other time.... We're not away very long, month or so...."

He followed me to the gangway and I bade him farewell and bon-voyage. He had donned a double-breasted coat with brass buttons and a cap with a badge and gold cord on it. The effect on my mind was somewhat disquieting. He seemed to have vanished behind an official mask, a mask whose sympathy with and knowledge of me was inexpressibly remote. I looked back as I crossed over towards the ferry, and saw him in deep conversation with the Chief Officer.

It was between four and five when I boarded the Staten Island ferry once more. The wind had gone down with the sun, whose red globe flung long bars of ruddy gold athwart the still water. I took my stand on the upper deck. Once again I looked across the bay and beheld that wonderful vision of New York floating above a blue haze, a mass of glittering pinnacles and rose-pink walls flaunting snowy pennants of white vapour, and looped to the sombre vagueness of Brooklyn by the long catenary curves of the suspension bridges. As the steamer started I walked aft, that I might not see the dissolution of the phantasy. It may be a weakness; but there is to me, mingled with all perception of beauty, a feeling akin to pain. Often I have envied those more robust souls who can gaze with unfaltering eyes at the beauty of this world, and feel no pang. I am not so. I was absorbed in this thought when I saw a steamer with two red funnels coming round from the Kills. At the masthead blew a flag with a blue eagle. As she came across our track I saw that she was the Raritan. On the poop-deck was a familiar figure, short, rotund and blue. I stepped to the end of the deck and waved my hand. Mr. Carville was walking back and forth, hands in pockets, his corn-cob pipe in his mouth. He paused and caught my signal, answering heartily. As the distance between us increased he resumed his promenade, and the Raritan, threading the Narrows, dwindled to a dark blot surmounted by a patch of vivid red. Once again I turned northwards, and the swift dusk of evening was falling. The sun had dropped behind the Jersey hills, and uprising behind Manhattan was a grey mist and a steely sky, ominous of snow.

As I walked up Pine Street to Van Diemen's Avenue the air was opaque and silent, while the thick, soft flakes that touched my face like chill fingers clung to my coat and balled under my feet. Winter, as we know it not in England, was come at last.



CHAPTER XIII

MISCELLANY

It has struck me often enough of late that, for an artistic and literary colony, ours is not very acute. For it is a sad and undeniable fact that, now the Carvilles are gone away to live on Staten Island, they seem to have ceased to exist as far as Netley is concerned. We alone seem to have attained to some small knowledge of Mr. Carville's peculiar record and essentially individual philosophy. We alone know the relationship with the celebrated and unfortunate Icarus who achieved international fame by crossing the Atlantic, only to crash to earth, as so often happens, in a comparatively trivial enterprise. Mr. Carville and his family never became the talk of the country club. They roused no interest at the soda-counter of Pakenham's drug-store or in the room behind the bar of Slovitzsky's Hotel on Chestnut Street. Our literary club makes no mention in its List of Authors who have lived in Netley, of Mr. Carville and his Cameos of the Sea. Happy the nations who have no history, they say, and no doubt the aphorism may be applied to families as well. Certainly, if Mr. Carville proposed, as no doubt he did, that his family should attain to felicity by a profound obscurity, he has attained his desire. It is left for Time to show whether Benvenuto Cellini and Giuseppe Mazzini, when they grow up, will emerge from that obscurity and astonish the world with some novel manifestations of the family genius.

But this is to anticipate. The immediate point is that none of our neighbours—not even our own friends, like Williams nor Eckhardt, nor Wederslen nor Confield, which last has a sort of vested interest in Europe which is attested by his much-travelled bag—had any inkling of the story to which they saw us listening as they passed our porch on certain afternoons that fall. How little does Mrs. Wederslen think, for example, that her surmise about the burnt aeroplane was grotesquely wrong! How little does Williams, when he brings us his water-colours, done in that fall-vacation at Bar Harbor, appreciate at its real value our etching of an aeroplane lying across an English hedgerow! Even Miss Fraenkel, I think, has no clear knowledge of Mrs. Carville's part in the tragedy of that New Year's Night. I remarked early in this narrative that Miss Fraenkel's importance in it was of the slightest. Her charming enthusiasm was ever an ignis fatuus leading her into unprofitable bye-ways of conjecture. We have, therefore, the superior position as regards the vanished family who lived next door. We know, as I have said, where they are gone; but we do not tell. It gives us a certain rare aesthetic pleasure to keep our own counsel.

And I think I may say we are qualified, after New Year's Day, to keep any secret, for we kept it from the Metropolitan Press when they invaded us, a dozen strong, to "take our statements." We laugh over it now, that sudden descent of New York "leg-men," breezy, businesslike, well-dressed young gentlemen of the "clean-cut" type; but we were glad enough when they were through asking for facts and photographs and impressions, and had gone, leaving the porch rather mussed-up and the snow in front as though a herd of buffaloes had trampled it. But even this is to anticipate a little.

I have mentioned, somewhere, that our devotion to the purer and less remunerative branches of our respective arts led us occasionally to take a holiday. With a subconscious deference to the advice of our local doctor, that "sedentary folks should sell their automobiles and take long walks," our day's vacation sometimes took us into the country. We had no automobile to sell, unfortunately; but otherwise we carried out the venerable gentleman's instructions by starting early and returning home late in a condition approaching collapse. We thus came to know certain tracts of Passaic and Bergen Counties in a manner quite impossible to the motorist. We struck off roads and took to the wooded hills of the Deer Foot Range. We spent forenoons losing ourselves and then, having eaten our sandwiches and drained our flasks, would pass the rest of the day trying for a predetermined point, but generally emerging into some unknown and delightfully unsuspected valleys of quietness; Sleepy Hollows down which no headless horsemen had ever thundered to startle the wild-fowl sailing low in the evening twilight, and over which the moon would later pour her serene, unearthly radiance; while we, footsore, hungry, thirsty, and quite absurdly elated at our success, would press on towards some twinkle of light in the distance, which told us of refreshment, and possibly a welcome railroad journey home.

It was only natural that, on those rambles which we took after Mr. Carville had begun his story and while he himself was rambling more extensively about the Western Ocean, my friend and I would discuss him and the highly stimulating outlook upon life which his original mind working in a novel medium had engendered. Indeed, it would not be too much to say that he monopolized our interest to the exclusion of Art. Or rather he, as a living and concrete example, became a kind of test, to which we brought a great deal we had thought and seen and read. To me he became significant of even more, for he contravened, in his own life and philosophy, so much that is generally taken for granted in fiction, that I grew doubtful both of him and the conventions he flouted. It had been obvious to me for some years that any advance in imaginative work seemed impossible inasmuch as the most advanced men had found nothing ahead but a stone wall, against which they advanced in vain. The theory that there was a hole in this wall somewhere, through which we could get into a freer air and less trammelled conditions, was attractive enough. We were all looking for this hole, but somehow it had eluded us. I, in my humble way, had groped and analyzed and plotted to find it, but without success, when suddenly it seemed to me I heard a voice from the other side, Mr. Carville's voice, telling us not only what the world looked like out there, but also how he got there. This is no doubt a fanciful picture; but one of Mr. Carville's salient points was the way he, the least fanciful of men, appealed to the fancy of others and painted pictures without the use of violent colours and futile superlatives. And the impersonal note which he maintained did really give to his story the effect of a voice coming over a wall.

So I looked at the matter, and so I explained it on our long walks through Pompton and on to Greenwood Lake. But my friend, though he accepted much of my theorizing as interesting, was struck most powerfully by Mr. Carville's strange attitude towards his native land. It was all very well, Mac urged, to get through a hole in the wall and show the way to freedom from conventions in art, though (to his mind) conventions were all right if you found the market—but to say that England was "on the crumble" was silly. And to harp on gentility ... Mac shook his head.

"But that is one of the stones he had to remove to make his hole in the wall," I argued.

"Then your wonderful hole in the wall is only our old friend the Door of Unconventionality," he retorted.

"By no means. He's the most conventional chap we have met since we left the Chelsea Arts Club. What singles him out from so many others is that he saw where he fitted. And it so happened that he fitted somewhere below that to which he would supposedly climb. Consider! Most of us never attain to the position to which we imagine it has pleased God to call us. We are perpetually struggling to succeed. We 'get on in the world,' it is true, but only comparatively. To hear some of us talk, you'd think the world itself wasn't made sufficiently large and well-furnished to supply us with the position we are designed to fill. But Mr. Carville looks, not higher, but lower. He espies the particular niche which suits him perfectly, and he calmly descends a few rungs of the ladder and steps off into oblivion. Not the niche, mind you, that the world might estimate as his, and which would procure for him the guerdon of wealth and fame and posthumous biographies; but the niche which he conceives to contain for him all that he, according to some highly original conception of ultimate justice, deserves. As for England being 'on the crumble,' I consider it a conservative description of what has been going on in that country for years. In most departments of life England has crumbled, literally crumbled away. What Mr. Carville omits is the emergence of the new England, an England he doesn't like, an England we shall probably find hard to assimilate and which may quite conceivably drive us to do what Mr. Carville has sagely done already—come back here and stop for good!"

So we talked! At least, I talked and my friend concurred, or demurred, or very often digested my wisdom in silence—the silence that, betwixt friends, means as much or even more than speech. And I remember, one still evening, the patches of dry snow lying on the grass of the sidewalk and the lawns, as we came wearily up Van Diemen's Avenue after a tramp to Echo Lake, there had been a long silence after I had been theorizing on the subject of Mrs. Carville. I am always listened to indulgently on the subject of women! It is tacitly taken for granted that my knowledge of the subject is exclusively theoretical. I do not contest this, because the converse of the proposition, that all married men are practical experts, is so absurd that nobody ventures to state it. I had been discussing Mrs. Carville and the probable effect of American life upon her when she should have more leisure to cultivate herself. My point was that she might possibly have some influence upon her husband. And this was followed, as I have said, by a long silence.

"No," said Mac, at length, "I don't think so." I had almost forgotten what we were talking about, for I could already see that the lamps in the dining-room were lighted and shadows moving on the blind.

"Oh!" I said. "Why not?"

"Well," he answered. "Of course, we don't know her very well, but we do know him. And I should say that the woman doesn't live who could shift him from what he proposed to do. You may not see it in the same way, but it is plain enough. His brother," went on my friend with a laugh, "hasn't all the devil in the family, and don't you think it."

And we came up to the door and sat down in the porch to take off our boots. I confess this view was to me entirely novel. I felt chagrined that I had been so lacking in intelligence as to miss so obvious a possibility. I had a faint, uneasy suspicion that my friend was laughing at me. But the idea was so pregnant with interest that I soon forgot my mortification. Before I had got my boots completely off I was away on a tour of this new and fascinating region. I leaned back in my chair and gazed pensively towards the faint glare of New York City. It was true, I reflected, that we had at the very first postulated a certain friction between our neighbour and his wife. But then we had not listened to the love story of our neighbour and his wife. I thought, as I sat there, that I saw the point I had missed. Mr. Carville, supposing he had what my friend called the devil in the family, would not exploit it while telling us the story of his life. And so I, who had abandoned myself to the enjoyment of his peculiar mentality, had forgotten that he might have, all the time, some of the "devil" after all, that he might, in short, be difficult to live with. I hesitated to use the word "faults." Mr. Carville himself had seemed to imply that the ordinary matrimonial disagreements were as inevitable and as fundamental as cosmic disturbances. Perhaps they were. "Devil," however, was another matter.

"I wonder who's indoors," said Mac, getting up. Thus roused, I heard voices inside, with laughter from Bill. The next moment the door opened and Benvenuto Cellini and Giuseppe Mazzini were discovered behind it.

"What, visitors?" said Mac, touching the dimples in their cheeks; and they nodded and looked at each other in a very taking way they had. Bill came in hastily. "They came in this afternoon," she explained, "and asked most solemnly if they might have some tea. Ma was gone to New York, they said, and she might be late."

"'That so?" said Mac. "Well, we'll have 'em to dinner as well. What 'say, you chaps? Will you have dinner with us?"

Again they nodded and looked at each other, and Ben remarked gravely that they were hungry.

We went off to have a wash and a change.

They certainly were two pretty little men as they stood there in red jerseys and blue corduroy knickers. My friend's custom of snatching open the piano and heralding dinner with a furious tornado of chords pleased them vastly.

"What's that for?" Beppo inquired expectantly.

"Chop," said Mac, rumpling their hair. "Pipe all hands to the galley. Here comes the salt horse and the hard tack."

"Their father isn't a deck-swab," I remarked mildly.

"Perhaps not," he retorted, "but pipe all hands etcetera is in that comic opera I'm illustrating and doing the costumes for, and I've got it on the brain. Have you noticed," he went on, "that Carville seems to have no professional slang?"

"He's not typical of his class," I admitted. "Any more than his wife is of her's, I suppose. Moreover, he knows we know nothing of his work and explains it in simple language. Does it not occur to you," I inquired, "that his avoidance of slang and dialect and foreign words and profanity is part of the freedom of the other side of the wall? Think of what we have lived through in the last twenty years! We have listened to a tale of the ends of the earth and the teller of it neither foams at the mouth nor talks in a strange technical jargon nobody ever spoke and nobody can understand. Without naming any names, isn't it a relief? Isn't it refreshing? After the terrible experiences we have had in the past!"

"Did mother tell you to come in?" he asked the children after nodding to me.

"Yes," said Beppo, thrusting out his chin and working his neck slowly as Bill tied a napkin round it. And he went on in a thin, clear, little voice: "We ha'nt any help in our house, an' Ma she had to go to the stores, so we said we'd like comin' in here to see you till she comes back."

"Well, that's awfully nice of you, old chap. Next time you'll bring mother too, eh?"

They looked at each other at this, and then at their spoons as they leaned over the soup.

"Anyhow, you'll ask her, won't you?" coaxed Bill. "Say, how pleased we shall be if she comes in some evening."

They smiled, and Beppo said, "Sure, we'll ask her," and then we all laughed. I suppose we were a trifle fatuous about them and treated them more as delicious playthings than as human beings. They bore it very well, however, and after dinner, when my friend, in spite of his long tramp and a "job" half done upstairs in the studio, played the piano, and did conjuring tricks with a handkerchief and a glass of water, and then got out a concertina which had often wakened the echoes of King's Road, Chelsea, in the small hours, they were in raptures. The concertina certainly impressed them as "a divine box of sounds." After "Church Bells in the Distance" they jumped and clapped their hands and said "Bully!" A new and appreciative audience is always stimulating to an artist. My friend surpassed himself. He told them about the London costers, how they had hundreds of pearl buttons and velvet collared coats and wide bell-mouthed trousers, how they played the concertina so beautifully that the policemen in the streets wept into their helmets and the King came out of his palace and danced a jig with the Lord Mayor outside the Mansion House. And he told them how it sometimes chanced the coster got drunk on his way home, and this made him play very pathetically indeed like this ... and then the broken strains of "Two Lovely Black Eyes" came forth, but ended abruptly in a squeak. That, they were told, was his wife, Eliza, who had come out and slapped him. Eliza had joined the Salvation Army and sang only hymns. This was the prelude to "Where is My Wandering Boy To-night?" rendered in a way, Bill remarked sotto voce, calculated to keep him wandering. But Beppo and Ben sat on the edge of their chairs, entranced. It was evidently a novel evening for them. We put the concertina away and got a drawing-board with a sheet of paper and a stick of charcoal, and everybody had to draw a pig blindfold. The usual fragmentary animals appeared, some so embryonic as to be unrecognizable by their designers, some with tails in their ears, others with too many legs. My own efforts were adjudged the best, which led Bill to express surprise that a man who couldn't draw anything at all with his eyes open should be able to draw a pig blindfold. Tired of this, Mac put on a pair of castanets and danced a Spanish fandango. He hung up a sheet in front of his studio lamp and performed an amazing series of shadow-pictures representing the "Hunting of the Snark." When our small visitors saw the Tub-Tub, "that terrible bird," flapping horribly about with his three-cornered eyes glaring at them, they grasped our hands and shouted with the most exquisite mingling of horror and delight. They were consoled with a wrestling match to which my versatile friend challenged himself. Having shaken hands with himself, he then grasped himself in the most approved catch-as-catch-can manner, struggled desperately to throw himself and finally triumphed by flinging himself in the air, turning a somersault and coming down on the carpet with a bump. Getting up and falling exhausted into a chair, he was greeted with loud cries to "do it again."

"No, indeed, you won't," said Bill emphatically. "You must be crazy to do it at all after walking I don't know how many miles. Children, do you want to kill my husband?"

They shook their heads solemnly. At that moment they evidently thought him quite the most wonderful person in the world. I often think so myself and I know his wife holds that view always. So I at once inaugurated a story-telling competition. I told them of an extraordinary affair that had once happened in England, where I was eking out a wretched existence as a hunter of buried treasure. I had received information about a tomato-can full of diamonds hidden in a beef-steak pie which would be served at a certain old inn on the shores of a lake far away towards the North Sea, and I was just packing up my patent can-opener, a box of candy and a packet of gum for refreshment on the way, and a pair of silver-mounted pistols like those in the studio upstairs, when an old woman with bright red hair tapped at the door ... tap-tap! Ben and Beppo both looked at the door, and Bill said in a low voice, "Don't frighten them; you'll make them dream." But they were watching me once more with their round, expectant eyes, and I was racking my brains to discover the purport of the old woman with the bright red hair—for I am always inventing fascinating characters about which I know nothing!—when the brass Canterbury Pilgrim was lifted twice and we heard a real knock on a real door ... tap-tap!

It was Mrs. Carville. She stepped quickly into the room so that the door might be closed on the cold night air, and looked round with an unwonted gaiety in her mien. As her gaze fell upon the two little boys, who stood close to my knee and hampered my rising, I fancied the expression of her fine dark eyes hardened a little. It may have been only fancy, but it made me wonder if the cause of her elation lay beyond the family circle. At first I had a twinge, for when a woman, whose husband is in some Mediterranean port, is elated by something beyond her front door, the world (and I belonged to the world, after all) looks grave. I suppose I myself looked grave as I bowed, for she regarded me—her eyes coming back to my face for a moment—with a certain gallant challenge, as though she read my shadowy thought and defied it. And then, sitting back in my chair again and watching her respond to the charm of my friend's manner, I could not help wishing that Mr. Carville had seen fit to give us a little more of his wife's character in his narrative. It seemed to me that the dry, clear light of his recondite mind would have thrown into admirable gleams and shadows, gleams of humour and shadows of blind fate, the brilliant creature who sat before us. There was nothing material in her manner as she let her glance fall again upon the children. The gaiety super-imposed upon her customary staid gravity seemed to have made her, not younger or less mature, but less domestic, more complex and mystifying. And I found myself recalling Mr. Carville's contemptuous moralizings upon the illusory nature of love. I tried, foolish as it may seem, to place myself intellectually in the place of a woman like Mrs. Carville, to conceive her probable fundamental attitude towards her offspring, trodden smooth and firm by the daily round of chores, an active, vigorous mind in an active, vigorous body.... Well, this was journeyman's work, I suppose, for a novelist; yet for me it had a freshness and spice that led me on until I pulled up sharply and felt the pang of shame. I am continually torn in the conflict between realism and what are called "unworthy thoughts." If it were not for a fear of traducing my own character by an ambiguous phrase, I would confess to many "unworthy thoughts" of many worthy people. I suppress them, of course, as I suppressed these concerning Mrs. Carville's trip to New York and the secular gaiety that now sat like a diadem on Mrs. Carville's forehead; but I have them all the same.

I was roused by Mrs. Carville's rising and saying that the children must go to bed.

"Let them come in again soon," said Mac. "We would like to say 'any time,' you know, but we're like parsons and doctors, we work at home and we can't have holidays every day."

"I am glad they have been no trouble," she replied, regarding them with a preoccupied approval.

"Trouble!" My friend was indignant. "We haven't enjoyed ourselves so much in years, I assure you, Mrs. Carville. You've had a good time, you chaps, eh?" he asked them and they nodded with reminiscent delight shining in their eyes. "Bully!" said Beppo, and Ben, more taciturn, added an expressive glance at his brother that signified profound assent. I found their scarlet woolen caps while my friend expatiated upon the delightful privilege of having two such fine little chaps. Mrs. Carville at first sought, by a quick glance at her hostess, some sympathy for her own soberer feelings in the matter. But Bill, though not caring for children to madness, had fallen in love with these two, and gave to them much of the credit for their pretty ways and well-bred habits that by right belonged to their mother. And so Mrs. Carville, seeing only corroborative enthusiasm in Bill's expression, turned to me.

"To us they are angels," I explained, laughing, "and you must permit us to love them in our own way. It is so easy to love without responsibility, you know."

She pondered this an instant, looking at me sombrely the while and then illumination came, and she flashed a glance of vivid answering intelligence and nodded.

"Yes," she said, turning to the door, and lifting the latch. "Yes," she repeated, opening the door and looking out into the night. "It is very easy."

And the next moment they were gone and we were alone once more.

"Gee!" said my friend, yawning. "If I'm not all in!"

"You've both got to go straight to bed," said his wife briskly. "You won't be worthy thirty cents in the morning, and you'll just loaf round and ..."

The telephone bell whirred and Mac closed his mouth abruptly on his third consecutive yawn and sprang to the instrument. We sat and watched. There was some little trouble on the line at first, common in party lines where outside bells sometimes ring and the owners have to be pacified. Then "Oh yes"——"Yes, I hear you——Yes" and a long unintelligible series of affirmatives in different keys. My friend's face and figure gradually lost all appearance of fatigue. His eyes sharpened and glared at us over the receiver as he listened and said "yes" with exasperating reiteration. His wife signalled dolefully to me that it was probably a bird's-eye view, and she'd never get him up in the morning to catch the seven o'clock. It occurred to me at the time that bird's-eye views are not usually ordered at ten o'clock at night; but I was too absorbed in watching my friend's expression of bewilderment, doubt, delight and anticipation in rapid succession, and I did no more than shrug. At length he smiled broadly, remarked, "Right. I'll get busy. See you later, Jimmy. G'bye," and rang off. And then, to my amazement and his wife's indignation, he threw his heels in the air and walked across the room on his hands!

"What's the matter with you?" she asked severely. Assuming a conventional position again, and walking up and down with his hands in his pockets, he told us the cause of his excitement.

"It's Jimmy Larkin in the News Building. He's got a big job on. Got to go south and wait for orders. He's got a pal in the Navy at Norfolk, and he's phoned that they'd just received a wireless from a cruiser in the West Indies somewhere to say she'd spoken an aeroplane going north-west. They think it's that chap—you know?—and Lord Cholme of the Morning's springing something on us. Anyhow, Jimmy's got the assignment and he's put me in too, to do some hurry-up sketches on the spot if we're lucky."

"Not to-night!" said Bill, aghast.

"Sure, to-night. I'll have to take the trolley into Newark and join Jimmy on the New Orleans Limited there."

"Then," I said, "this is a wild-goose chase after our neighbour's brother?"

Mac is an extremely practical man, and he merely shrugged his shoulders. "Maybe, old man. Whether it's him or somebody else, the story has to be covered, and we're away to cover it. It might mean a staff job later for the News, eh?"

"It's quite a romance," I remarked.

"Romance nothing—it's bread and butter, man! Where's my grip? Oh yes, I remember." And he pranced away upstairs to the studio to pack the tools of his craft. His wife, who was looking out linen and hosiery and all the things a woman firmly believes a man can never remember for himself, and without which he is a mere shivering forked radish, found time to order me to bed, but was drawn away immediately into an argument concerning the climate in the south. My friend, evidently viewing underwear, remarked that he was going south, not north to Labrador, and where was his seersucker suit. He was informed that his seersucker suit had been in the rag-basket for years, and, anyway, her husband wasn't going on a trip without adequate clothing. I reached for my boots and put them on. It seemed to me it was my duty to see him safely into his berth on the Limited. After some ten minutes of vigorous packing and debate, they came down, and found me ready.

"You aren't going too?" cried Bill.

"To the train," I said. "He might fall asleep on the road."

If I had hoped to get much more information out of him by going into Newark, I was disappointed. The question of the Carvilles and their adventures had been wiped clean from his mind by the more immediate and personal affair of an assignment. I am afraid that even if I had had a part in this amusing attempt to forestall the other papers I would still have been more interested in the airman than in the astonishing enterprise on which he was engaged. I could not bring myself to gape at scientific marvels. As I have said before, let Science do her worst: humanity remains the same fascinating enigma.

And yet, as we sat in the empty, rattling car, our feet crunching the pea-nut shells and chicle coverings of some Passaic joy-riders, and my friend discussed with enthusiasm the probable outcome of the expedition, I realized that, after all, I could not expect him to share my burden. For good or ill the writer must carry with him for ever the problem of the human soul. The plastic artist has his own problems of light, and mass, and the like. And from this I came back circuitously to Mr. Carville. I was puzzled to find a name for the deliberate rejection of his responsibilities as an artist. One could not call him a renegade or a coward, for he was neither. And yet his acceptance of an obscure destiny had in it nothing of the sacredness of renunciation. It was almost as though he were hoarding his soul's wealth, and adroitly avoiding any of the pangs and labours of the spiritual life. Because it seemed to me that, for a man of his receptivity, the normal bovine existence of the humble folk among whom he lived was out of the question. He knew too much, was too alive to the shifting lights and shadows of life, to sit, like grey-haired Saturn, "quiet as a stone." Perhaps he had some unknown ulterior ambition on which he was brooding through the years. I had read of such cases, though I confess I always suspect the biographer of a picturesque imagination. He sees too clearly. He is wise after the event. It seems that the roots of a man's virtue are hidden, after all.

We had not long to wait when we reached the station. The long, black, heavy train rolled in and we climbed into a Pullman. A broad, red face, with upstanding Irish hair above it, was thrust through a pair of lower berth curtains. Mr. Larkin was known to me slightly as a "live-wire." I explained why I had come to the opposite berth which was reserved. While my friend was settling with the conductor, I took the opportunity to sound Mr. Larkin, who was offering me a cigar. He nodded vigorously.

"Sure. It's that whats-his-name guy—Frank Lord he calls himself. I've been covering all that flyin' dope in England since 'way back, and I knew Lord Cholme had some stunt coming. Ah, that's it—Carville. Yep. His stage name's Lord. No, he can't come all the way at one lap. You must be crazy. He'd want a ship load of gasoline. We had it all planned years ago. North or south he must go. Barometer's been steady now all over the Atlantic, so he's gone south—Madeira, Azores, Barbados and so on. Hits America in Florida maybe, where it's easy landin' among all them bayous and swamps. Oh we'll get him all right, don't you worry."

"And where do you stop?" I asked.

"Rocky Mount, if we get no news beforehand."

I got out, and the train moved off on the ninety-mile spin to Philadelphia. I wondered if I had displayed a genuine sporting interest. I was very tired, and the four-mile journey in the trolley-car was tedious. As I passed the dark house next door, Mrs. Carville's voice came back to me as she caught the meaning of my words that evening. I had said it was easy to love without responsibility, and she had answered with an eagerness of assent that I could not forget. I had at times experienced the evanescent and perilous temptations of that love that needs no understanding, the love that lights no torch, and is but a vagrom fancy crossing the beaten tracks of life ... for an instant I stood, with the key in my hand, and pondered the next house and the sombre secret of which it was the symbol. On the horizon the great light on the Metropolitan Tower flashed the hour of midnight.

As I let myself in, it occurred to me that Mr. Carville would be walking to and fro, smoking a meditative pipe beneath the stars, his thoughts, no doubt, flying westward like enigmatic night-birds, and hovering above the home towards which he was speeding.



CHAPTER XIV

DISCUSSION

One of the immemorial customs of New York, whenever a stranger arrives from across the sea, should he by any chance have ever done anything, anywhere, is to give him a show. When you understand the root-principle of this practice, you are on the way to understanding New York, and incidentally, America. For in spite of many cynical arguments to the contrary, I remain satisfied that New York is, after all, part of the United States. Just as Broadway is a rather over-illuminated Main Street, so the metropolitan press is a highly concentrated Local Interest. You arrive on an ocean liner instead of on the Limited, but the principle is the same. You come from foreign parts, from effete Europe; you are a distinguished stranger, and everybody, in the person of their press, turns out to stare and cheer and find out your opinion of our glorious country. It is true that, after a few days of embarrassing publicity, your photograph vanishes from the daily sheets, your hotel ceases to be besieged by public emissaries asking your opinion of Mr. Roosevelt, Baked Beans or Twilight Sleep; you discover (with a pang) that you are forgotten, and a French Scientist or an Italian Futurist, or a Russian Nihilist has taken your place. But that, after all, may be the extent of your merits. You have had your show. New York has given your hand a jovial, welcome squeeze. The most hospitable hosts cannot forever regard you as a new arrival. You pass on, and others take the floor in the spot-light and register surprise, pleasure, indignation, criticism or whatever their peculiar talent may dictate. And this custom of the town is not at all comparable with the reception accorded St. Paul when he arrived at Athens and found the citizens of that republic hankering after some new thing. It is at the other end of the scale of human motives. It is the curiosity and enthusiasm of youth rather than the prurience of age. It is, in its way, a test of character. You may have weathered adversity with credit. New York will see how you behave in prosperity. I often suspect the headline which says that So-and-So won't talk, to cover a good deal of moral cowardice. So-and-So has probably become afraid of the intoxicating fumes of publicity. Fame, he discovers, blended with the unfamiliar high-tension atmosphere of Manhattan Island, is heady stuff. He finds many of his old notions burst asunder amid so much noise and light and swift movement. He will, if he be British, feel constrained to run down England, just as later on, when he returns to London, he will write a book running down America. So-and-So flies from temptation and "refuses to talk."

All this is more or less apropos of Mr. Francis Lord's arrival in New York after having crossed the Atlantic in a sea-plane. As a matter of fact Mr. Francis Lord was making for Key West, when what is called engine-trouble caused him to descend to the surface of a perfectly smooth sea. The weekly mail-boat from Belize to New York was speeding up the Florida Channel when the officer of the watch made out a large triplane ahead of him. It was apparently trying to rise, but without success. The course of the steamer was altered to bring her more in the way of the machine. Just as they were approaching, the triplane rushed across their bows, rose out of the water, and instead of "banking," slid down side-ways, completely submerging the right-hand planes. The ship was stopped and a boat lowered. According to the laconic report of the commander, who seemed more anxious to claim a record for his boat-crew than to share the glory of salving an eminent airman's life, they had the boat up and were under way again inside of eighteen minutes. And so Mr. Francis Lord arrived in New York in the usual prosaic way, and our enterprising friends, accompanied by a score of other hunters of "scoops," had to return hastily. It does not appear, however, that they would have gained anything had they remained, because the astute Lord Cholme had provided a press-agent. This gentleman, we heard long afterwards, was in Savannah superintending the first rehearsals of a gigantic film-drama depicting the Conquest of the Atlantic. On hearing of his principal's arrival on a steamer he took the next train north, and from the moment he reached Mr. Francis Lord's hotel on Fifth Avenue, Mr. Francis Lord seemed lost to view. We found in the papers no interviews with Mr. Lord. He "refused to talk." The press-agent, however, handed out type-written statements about the trip, the islands where landings were made, the readings of the instruments, the difficulties which ended in capsizing the machine almost in sight of land, the time taken, the speed in miles per hour, the distance travelled, the records made and broken. He handed out accounts of the lives of M. D'Aubigne, the inventor, Lord Cholme, the promoter, and Mr. Francis Lord, the airman. He handed out photographs of the three. He handed out plans of the triplane. The reporters grew tired of seeing the press-agent, for he invariably handed out some deadly-dull document without the ghost of a story attached to it. The kindly human side of the great adventure seemed non-existent. The public wanted to know what the great man really looked like, what he had for breakfast, where he went in the evening, what he thought of Fifth Avenue, of the Woolworth Building, of our glorious country. And it followed naturally that since Mr. Francis Lord maintained his silence and invisibility, it devolved upon the Press to provide imaginative replies to all these burning questions. They described Mr. Francis Lord, they drew pictures of him in original attitudes, they reported rumours of his movements, they conjectured and arranged his future plans, they concocted competitions between him and illustrious American airmen, they professed to have heard that a Swiss was already preparing to beat Mr. Francis Lord's record by a flight from Lake Geneva to Lake Erie, they used all their genius to make a public success of Mr. Francis Lord and his achievement.

And then they dropped him.

To us, reading the news day by day after breakfast, it was, of course, inevitable. I think my friend felt it more than I, for he has a profound faith in publicity. It is the secret of his success as a publicist, I suppose. His theory is, that no matter how good your article may be, you cannot sell it unless you advertise. You must boom, you must shout and show yourself and talk to people. You must "get next." He calls it "making an appeal." He thinks Mr. Francis Lord and his wonderful press-agent had not played up to the great traditions of American newspaper life. He sketched lightly for me a plan which he and Larkin agreed would have "put him across."

"But," I argued mildly, "what could he do? Do you propose he should hire a theatre and exhibit himself? Why should he want to be advertised?"

My friend made a movement of impatience.

"You miss the whole point," he retorted. "Why did Whistler wear that white lock of hair of his? Why did Wilde start that Green Carnation stunt? Why did Chamberlain wear a monocle, or Gladstone those big collars?"

"I don't know, I'm sure," I said feebly, "unless it was...."

"It was simply to fix their personalities in the public mind. If you've done a big, wise thing, the public won't take any notice of you unless you do some little, silly thing."

"I wish you'd tell the public this, old man," I said.

"The public don't give a darn," he returned grimly.

"Evidently they don't in this case. And I don't see why they should, if you ask me. Even suppose he had crossed the Atlantic, which he hasn't, for he fell into the sea—even suppose he had, what of it? Would his walking up Fifth Avenue in pink tights with an arum lily in his hand...."

But my friend was gone upstairs to his studio and my subtle sarcasm was lost. We look at this question of public performances from different angles. When we heard of a neighbour's son earning ten dollars every Saturday by going up in a balloon and descending in a parachute (very often alighting upon some embarrassingly private roof) Mac thought it very creditable of him and mighty poor pay. I contended that it was a good deal more than the job was worth, because it was worth exactly nothing. It was not worth doing. This, of course, laid me open on the flank. My friend suggested that this might be said of a good deal of literary work, and I admitted with a sigh that he was right. "There you are," said he, and we both laughed.

"Well," I said, at lunch, "I grant your premises. Why should this chap wish to fix his personality on the public mind?"

"Can't you see? To put his value up, of course."

"Doing ... why, of course, he's doing it for money. Who ever does anything in this infernal world except for money?"

"But since he failed—as he did, you remember—he hasn't any value to speak of."

Mac turned in despair to his wife.

"Did you ever see such a chap in your life? You'd think, to hear him, he'd never heard of appropriations for publicity campaigns, or advertising schemes. Things do themselves in his world—you don't even have to drop a nickel in the slot!"

Bill regarded me with attention.

"He's got something up his sleeve," she remarked, sagely. "If he keeps us guessing we'll send him to New York to have his Christmas dinner by himself."

"I'm not going to keep you guessing," I said, "but I haven't been able to get a word in edgeway yet. Leaving the great cosmic question of publicity, of which I get rather tired at times in spite of its lucrative side, I want to call your attention to something—I was going to say under our noses—something close by."

They gazed at me in doubt and then looked at each other. Mac made allusion, tapping his forehead the while, to the strain of Christmas work. And they shook their heads.

"Well, go on," humoured Bill, rising to bring in the coffee.

"What's this wonderful something you've discovered?"

"I have reason to believe," I said, without looking up from my plate, "that Mrs. Carville had a visitor last night."

"No!" they ejaculated in unison. I nodded.

"You miss something by sleeping at the back. Just as I was comfortably in bed, the room was flooded with the blinding white glare that indicates a passing automobile. This particular white glare, however, did not vanish as usual. It remained. My attention, which was only partially aware of it, gradually became undivided and led me to sit up and look out. A large car stood opposite the house next door, the two headlights showing up the roadway and sidewalk all down the street. Even as I watched, a tall figure came down from the house and the lights went out. I could see the car plainly as a dark mass under the trees. And that, for the best part of half an hour, was all I did see. I lay down again and tried to focus my mind on this problem. I don't mind admitting I am still without a solution. I lay there thinking all sorts until the white glare suddenly illuminated the room again. I looked out. The car moved, turned slowly round, and sped away down Pine Street."

They sat and looked at me.

"I know I ought to have told you before," I said, "but the fact is I was so puzzled this morning when I woke and remembered the incident, that I didn't know what to do. It seems silly, if you look at it in the cold light of day, to draw any conclusions from such a trivial thing. I mean, if we had known nothing about them...."

"You think he's visiting her?" said Bill gravely.

"I didn't say so," I answered, "but the notion was in my mind, certainly. If so, why should he not? If Mac had a brother, and he came to New York he would not hesitate to come and see you."

"Not in the middle of the night," she objected.

"No, unless he was pressed for time, and had, shall we say, more urgent claims on his attention."

"Perhaps he came to visit his brother, not knowing he was away just now."

"I thought of that too. Where is he supposed to be just now?"

"Lord? Jimmy said he was up-state visiting Gottschalk, the millionaire who is backing the Aerial Mail Company."

Nobody spoke for a minute or two. At length my friend rose and pushed his chair up against the table.

"Ah, well," he said, looking for his pipe, "we can't sit here chewing the rag all day."

I was sitting at my desk, biting my pen and staring absently at the whitey-brown vista of the garden with the cold blue ridge of the Orange Mountains showing through the delicate tracery of the wind-swept trees, when I heard Bill moving about the room behind me.

"You're not working," she observed perfunctorily. I nodded assent. I often wonder, to tell the truth, when I do work. Even when no one is by to tell me of it, I seem to spend most of my time in idleness.

"I was thinking," I said. Perhaps I was. She came up to my chair and looked out too.

"About—you know—last night?" she asked.

"Yes, I was thinking you, being a woman, would know better than I whether there is a storm brewing."

She was silent, merely looking out at the wintry landscape.

"I feel," I went on, "that being a rather dried-up old bachelor puts me at a disadvantage. What can I know of such a situation as we imagine? I, who jog along from day to day, a journeyman scribbler! What knowledge or experience have I of the heights and depths of passion? What can Peeping Tom know about it?"

"Don't!" she said. "We're all Peeping Toms, as far as that goes. I'm sure," she went on, "it's very difficult to guess what's in the mind of a woman like her. She's very handsome, you know. She's one of those women who are rather puny and pathetic in their 'teens, with appealing eyes, but who grow big and healthy later. Marriage does wonders for them."

"If the marriage is happy," I remarked casually. The silence that followed was so long that I twisted round in my chair. There was an odd expression on my friend's face, a commingling of wisdom, pity and reminiscence.

"What have I said?" I asked.

"No marriage is happy," she said gravely.

"Yes!" I responded.

"Not in the sense you understand the term. That's what we mean when we say you don't know anything about it. Marriage suits some men and women more than others, but that isn't to say the people it suits are any the happier. In fact, it's often the other way. They're frightfully unhappy at times. Very few married women haven't been on the point of—of making a dash for freedom at some time or other. Women you wouldn't accuse of a single rebellious thought all their born days. You'd say they were crazy. Perhaps so, at the time. They get all on edge. Weak, weedy women are different. They haven't the same call for freedom, somehow."

"What do you mean by this dash for freedom business?" I asked. Bill looked at me solemnly.

"Marriage is a ring-fence round a pretty small patch, as a rule," she observed. "A woman goes into it gladly. She feels young and weak and ignorant, and when she's married she feels safe. But when she grows up to her full stature of mind and body, and she's no longer weak and ignorant, it's different. It's no longer safety first with her."

"But love ..." I began. She stopped me.

"Oh, love's got nothing at all to do with it, you sentimental old thing. How old was Juliet—fourteen, wasn't she?" she asked suddenly, staring out of the window. I nodded.

"Well, there you are!" She has many of her husband's expressions. "At thirty-two, say, she would have been a fine, big, handsome woman, knowing the world and alive all round. The chances are she would have had a storm, as you call it."

"If she'd married Romeo?" I asked.

"'T wouldn't matter who she'd married," she replied, rubbing her nose. "You're thinking of love again, I'll be bound. I'm not talking about love, my good man, I'm talking about life."

"Then you make no allowance for sentiment," I said.

"Oh don't I! I make any amount of allowance for sentiment. It's just sentiment such women as we are talking about have to watch. That's what you mean by love, I suppose. It is always prowling round the house, trying to get in. As a rule, there's no chance, for married women are too busy to be eternally thinking about love, though to read novels you'd think they were."

"A married woman, according to you, is a highly complex organism," I observed smiling.

"A married woman, according to me, is precisely what her husband has made her," she retorted, and adding, "Think that over while you get on with your work," she left the room.

But I continued to stare out of the window. Somehow I was stirred. There seemed to me something ominous in my own preoccupation with these affairs, affairs in which I could not, even had I the right, to meddle. My friend's laconic exposition only deepened the dramatic quality of the situation. For an author I had been singularly luckless in meeting drama in my life. I had often had my artistic cupidity excited by Mr. Carville, by the way he was continually having stimulating adventures of the soul. And what stirred me now was a vision of that sober, drab-grey little man, going about his business on the great waters, with this portentous cataclysm hanging over his destiny. And yet, according to my friend, these perilous things were constantly on the brink in most men's lives. The smug, complacent commuting folk we knew all had these moments of almost unendurable stress, yet they gave no sign. I had a sudden sense of futility. As Mr. Carville had said on one occasion, we grope. We stumble against each other in the dark, we hear a whisper or two, or a cry, and the rest is silence. I understood, I thought, why so many writers avoid life, and content themselves with gay puppets in a puppet world. Life was too difficult, too dangerous, for play, and they can only play.

And then I heard the postman's knock, and sat waiting. Footsteps came down and went up again to the studio. Tea cups clinked. I realized that I had done nothing to the brochure I was writing since lunch. Lethargy is cumulative. The longer one idles the more difficult it is to make a start. I gave it up and put my pen away.

"A letter from Cecil," they said, as I appeared on the landing. Mac was crouching over an etching by the window, a big magnifying glass in his hand. I went over to him and he rose and handed the print to me.

"Oh!" I said. "This is indeed apropos."

It was an etching, by the painter-cousin, of the wrecked aeroplane of which he had spoken. As was fit and proper, it was a small plate, yet the effect upon the mind was of a vast open sky and infinite, rolling distances of land and sea. It brought to mind the grey flatness of Essex, the lonely reaches of mud, the solitary house and the neighbourly hedges of the narrow roads. And it did this quite independently of the bizarre structure that lay athwart the foreground, like some immense disabled insect in a moment of exhaustion. It lay there, prone and motionless, a sprawling emblem of despair. And aloft, high up, as though in subtle mockery of the poor human endeavour below, a sea-bird soared with wings atilt, sweeping with effortless grace towards the grey sea.

"I don't care for remarques," muttered Mac, pointing to a sketch on the margin.

"Nor I," I agreed, "but this isn't on the plate, my friend. Moreover, I think it's rather interesting. It is Carville, I believe, Mr. Francis Lord of the New York Press."

It was a sinister face that we looked on, sketched on the impressed margin, and very different from the photos in the papers. The head had been caught in an attitude of leaning against a wall, so that the salience of the jaw, the flare of the nostrils, and the white of the eye were accentuated sharply. The brow was high, but (I fancied) pinched near the crown, and the large, cavernous nose gave the whole face an expression of bird-like rapacity that was corroborated by the full curved lips. And in the eye I fancied also that I detected a crazed look.

"Good gracious!" said Bill. "What a bad-looking man!"

I was silent, merely returning the print so that my friend might study the weaknesses of a brother-artist. We agreed that the ink had dragged in one corner. Bill handed me the painter-cousin's letter.

"High Wigborough, "Essex.

"DEAR BILL—

"I was in the village this afternoon and called at the post-office for some stamps, and the old lady who keeps the place, which is about seven feet square, and hardly high enough to yawn in, was sticking up a fresh notice about the Xmas mails, giving the latest dates for foreign parts. This reminded me I owed you a letter, and here it is with tons of good wishes to everybody for a happy time and no end of prosperity in the coming year. When are you coming over to spend a holiday with us? You'd love this part of the world. I'm sure you'd love the old lady at the post-office as much as you do the young lady at the post-office over there. She's a beautiful old person, really. She lives in a cottage set well back from the road, with rose-trees on each side of a narrow, flagged path, and honeysuckle all over the house right up to the thatch, which is quite a yard thick. I have a water-colour of her, sitting outside her door, with the Royal Arms and Georgius Rex just showing over her cap, and a fat tabby cat asleep on the threshold. It was late summer when I did it, and the air was warm gold with purple shadows. I know it is a detestable trick to talk painter's shop, but I can't help it sometimes. I am reminded of this by the experiences I've had recently with my friend Carville, who now appears in the daily press rather frequently under his flying name of Francis Lord. There is a great row on between the papers owned by Lord Cholme (known as the Stunt Press) and the few other miserable rags which try to survive. I don't pretend to know what it's all about. There is, you know, an Aerial Telephone Company, promoted by Cholme and a lot of other guinea-pigs. Carville, I believe, wanted shares, or a seat on the board, or something, if he flew to America under their auspices. You know how jealously these moneyed people guard the sources of their wealth. Anyhow, negotiations hung fire, for Carville has D'Aubigne quite under his influence, and nothing could be done with the aeroplane or the patents until these two came in somehow. The rival newspapers go it blind, and sling all sorts of journalistic mud about. I won't bore you with it in a Xmas letter. What I was going to say was about Carville himself. He simply says 'No!' and goes on with his (to him) intensely interesting 'affaires.' And here is one of those coincidences, as the old lady at the post-office calls them. I was at an at-home in Chelsea one Sunday not long ago, and met a Mrs. Hungerford, Carville's grand bien-aimee, on and off, for a long time. She had recently married a wealthy Australian, who was also present, a large, subdued creature. My hostess was Mrs. Chase, the wealthy widow who married poor Enderby Chase the artist. I forget whether you ever met them. Superb woman, fit to be a duchess, though she says her ideal existence is to be an artist's wife, and she has an astonishing house on Cheyne Walk, with stabling for nine horses on the ground floor, and a stupendous yellow family victoria that Watkyns calls a Sarsaparilla waggon. Chase died a few years ago, you know, and his widow has elevated his memory into a sort of cult. She bought in all his really good pictures—dreary landscapes of the Smeary School!—and instead of framing them, she has had them panelled into the walls of the salon. I know this is the right way to 'hang' pictures, but I'll be hanged if I like it. I kept thinking of chocolate boxes! I suppose the walnut wainscotting gave me the idea. One of Enderby's pictures, his one-time famous Astarte, though he knew no more about Astarte than about Montezuma, was hung in a gold frame in the dining-room. Chase was no good at figures and it was Mrs. Hungerford's remark to me, that Enderby's Astarte if found in Regent Street would get three months without the option of a fine, that lured me to her side later. I went with Watkyns, with whom I was having lunch in his studio on the Walk. He discovered one of Mrs. Chase's cards on his mantel-piece and as it is her rule to bring a friend, we went. In spite of her worship of painters for Enderby's sake, Mrs. Chase really adores music and musicians. She has a Bechstein grand standing on an oak floor polished like glass, with tiger and bear-skins lying about. I am rather helpless among musicians. Mrs. Hungerford is a tall, thin girl about thirty, with curious flat, grey eyes that are most puzzling to meet unless she is smiling, which is only seldom. I had made an apologetic reference to my utter ignorance of Ravel and all the new men, and she replied drily that I wasn't missing much. I said I felt the lack of musical knowledge when talking to musicians.

"'They want you to feel it,' she said. 'Musical people don't seem to have any minds, only vanity.' And, by Jove, it exactly expressed what I had often felt. After supper we became chummy and sat in a corner talking about art and all sorts of things. She struck me as extremely experienced, as though her ideas were all original and had come from her own contact with life. I suppose knowing so many clever men has caused this. I mentioned Carville as one of the most remarkable men I'd ever met, and she said calmly, 'Yes, he is. I know him very well.' I suddenly remembered the other side of Carville's manifold nature and asked if I had made a mistake. She said with a laugh, 'Not at all. I understand him perfectly. We are excellent friends when we meet.'

"'Well,' I said, 'if you understand him, it is more than I do,' and I told her how Carville would come over to my place and prowl round the studio and watch me at work. I said I thought he ought to settle down. She laughed again and her grey eyes became luminous.

"'He will never do that,' she said. 'He is under some curse, I think. He complains he is forever doomed to be under the influence of inferior women. Inferior women are quite a hobby of his.' I remarked that she seemed to know him very well and her eyes became dead blank again. I asked if she knew the family, and she nodded. He has a brother, clever too, but in a different way. 'Oh, what became of him?' I asked. 'I suppose,' she said, 'he married some worthy middle-class creature and settled down somewhere. He wrote a book, but it didn't sell. I didn't read it. It was about machinery and the sea, and I loathe the sea. It bores me.'

* * * * *

"Well, my dear Bill, I'll bore you if I run on like this much longer. But I was very much struck by this girl of whom D'Aubigne had told me, especially as she mentioned your neighbour, and in view of Carville's antics. He never mentions his own affairs, as indeed why should he? But he seems, as he stands or sits watching me at work (for I have at last knocked it into his head that light is more precious to an artist than conversation) he seems to be eternally bothered by the fundamental differences that exist among men. He asks 'Why do you do it?' Now imagine the mind of a man who asks an artist why he paints! He will stare at my plate as I work, with his big black brows knitted, as if in a trance. And suddenly he will shrug his shoulders and take up his hat and go off without a word. Sometimes he doesn't come for several days. The last time I saw him was a week ago. I must tell you about it. I felt all cramped and muggy, and as the day was fine, biked over to the aerodrome. When I arrived D'Aubigne was looking through a pair of prism glasses. 'Where's Carville?' I said as I got off. He handed me the glasses and pointed up between two masses of billowy clouds. I stared and finally focussed on a minute speck against the blue. It was incredible, and, I think, sublime. I must say it thrilled me to see it. It is something new in life, if not in art, this supreme triumph over gravity. I am serious! Slowly he passed behind the cloud and I came back to earth. 'How high is he?' I asked casually, and it was like a match to tinder. D'Aubigne's battered, sensual old face lighted up and he cackled, 'How high? How do I know! Come. We will ask him!' As you may imagine, I nearly fell over in my surprise. He led the way to a hutch on which a tall tripod carried an aerial. There were no windows, and it appeared to be a kind of sound-proof call-box, which indeed it was. We went in and as the door closed, a cluster of three green lights, very small but of extraordinary brilliance, showed up above a set of instruments. D'Aubigne sat down and put a pair of receivers to his ears. I could just see a triangular hole in front of him. He began to pull plugs out of various holes and insert them in other holes, and presently he laughed and said, 'Comment!' and laughed again. Then, 'A gentleman wishes to know your altitude at this moment. What is the reading?' A silence and then, 'Four thousand metres? So! Wait!' He got up and offered me the receivers. I sat down and put them on, and immediately seemed to be in the midst of the wildest uproar. It was like kettle-drums playing in a high wind. I could distinguish the thunder of the exhausts, for there were two engines and one of them was missing badly and making noises like gun-shots. 'Speak!' said D'Aubigne into my neck, so I said, 'Hullo, are you there, Carville?' And a thin, high, metallic voice, like a gramophone's, sounded among the noises. 'Yes, I'm here. What's up?' 'Oh,' I said, 'I'm only trying this thing. How are you?' No reply for a moment, and then, 'I say, you don't mind if I cut you out, do you.... Having a beastly time with my port engine?' 'Sorry,' I said. There was no answer. I told D'Aubigne what Carville had said, and we went out into the open air again. You know, it seems marvellous, though I don't suppose it's any more so than many other inventions. But to think of that chap, nearly thirteen thousand feet in the air, actually talking to us down on the earth while he was wrestling with a battery or sparking plug, or something! Think of him sitting in the midst of that mass of metal and fabric, between the two thundering engines, doing six things at once, rushing along at sixty miles an hour, alone, magnificently alone, with the three lights of the instrument shining like emeralds in the sunlight! Upon my word, I was so upset with the extraordinary novelty of the whole experience that I had some difficulty in getting into harness again. Talk of Glorious Art indeed! D'Aubigne says Carville is an ass about Art. But has he not compensations?

"We went over to their living rooms next to the workshops and D'Aubigne made tea. I said it was a splendid thing and he ought to be awfully bucked up at having achieved such a success. He shrugged his shoulders. 'I am depressed,' he said. 'This country,' and he waved his hand towards the landscape outside, 'is very depressing. Earth, sea, and sky. Earth, sea, and sky. Nothing else. Flat, primitive like the day after Creation. Look!' He pointed to where a barge, brought up on the tide, lay stranded in a field of shining mud. 'That is the Ark, but Noah and all the animals save we are dead. I have none of the Dutchman's love for dikes and canals. I shall go to the Mediterranean.' 'And Carville?' I said. He cackled. 'Carville will go to the devil, I suppose. You are to blame. You have recalled memories, I understand. He talks to me of Rosa. Rosa! I am sick of the name. You would think he had learned that women are all the same. No. He has the profound illusion. He is enchanted. Rosa!'

* * * * *

"Of course, you must take all this with reserve. D'Aubigne, being artist and man of science, has a vivid imagination. But he understands Carville, and appreciates the difference between him and the average libertine. With Carville it is always a grande affaire. For the time, as D'Aubigne quaintly puts it, his love is like a red, red rose. And I relate my adventures to you because you have roused my interest in your neighbours and it is only fair for me to reciprocate.

"If it doesn't get lost on the way there is a small package coming by this mail. Bon Noel! And, by the way, you will see on the margin of the etching I send you a small sketch of Carville's head. What do you think of it? He came in while I was pulling a proof of this plate and looked at it curiously. 'My smash?' he inquired, and I said, 'Yes, your smash, old chap. How do you like it?' And he asked me, as he often does, 'Why do you do it?' He seems to have some sense missing in his make-up. He can't coordinate the actions of men. Perhaps that is the key to his character. D'Aubigne, who used to paint, as a student, vast canvases depicting Prehistoric Man fighting a mammoth, or Perseus chopping up Gorgons, said it was a good plate and wished he had gone in for etching. I fear he is like many painters—he doesn't realize the drudgery and technical labour involved. Let me know your opinion soon.

"All good wishes, "Cecil."

Our canary, who rejoices in the name of Richard the Lion-hearted, chirped for his customary morsel of cake, and I rose to give it to him. Mac was showing his wife the dragged line in the etching. Having rationed Richard, I stood looking out of the window. A keen wind was blowing and fine powdered snow drove over the open lot across the street. Coming up over the frozen grass I saw a tall figure in a scarlet cloak. The vigour of her gait deceived me at first, for it was the light trip of a girl in her teens, and then I saw that it was Mrs. Carville. I did not speak, but watched her, with lithe figure and features aglow, cross the street to her home. It seemed to me that I had no right to call attention to what I saw or imagined. Even if it were true, as my friend had said, as Mr. Carville himself, in his homely way, had remarked, that women, even more than girls, are the victims of evanescent illusions, that they abandon themselves, at times, to quite impossible and romantic dreams, I should be wise to stand aside. I felt that, after all, Miss Fraenkel's crystal-clear bromidity would be a delightful change after so much intense living and introspection. For that evening, after dinner, as I listened to the music of the Steersman's Song from the Flying Dutchman, it seemed only too likely that even after all these years, so deathless is passion in some hearts, the skilled hand of Frank Carville might set a woman's soul vibrating with some of the old ecstasy.



CHAPTER XV

CONCLUSION

It was a white Yule-tide that year. Late on Christmas Eve I crept carefully and circuitously up to the house next door and deposited our little parcel of gifts in the shadow of the porch. In an hour my tracks were covered. Sleighs passed, in the stealthy fashion of sleighs, the jingle of harness and bells mingling, the muffled figures of the riders looking strangely like stuffed effigies in the white radiance of the reflecting snow. And next morning, when I woke early, snow was still falling. But at breakfast, rather late in honour of the day, the sky was swept to a clean, clear transparent azure, and the sun shone with dazzling brightness on road and roof. Working industriously with our broad wooden shovels to clear a path from the porch to the street, I stole a glance next door. I was rather glum, I remember, to discover no sign of life, and later, over hot whisky, we debated whether we were really well enough acquainted to give presents. It is a habit of ours, however, very hard to break. Our idea is to give something which the recipient will like, and this involves thought, which is the essence and true spirit of giving. Some days before I had been despatched to Chinatown for the express purpose of buying coloured tops, snakes and kites. Bill had made Indian suits for the boys, and Mac had returned from the stores with a coasting sled, and a small pair of roller skates. Miss Fraenkel was to have a copy of Spenser's Faery Queen bound by us in blue leather and stamped with an original design. As Bill often says, we can make anything in the world except money. Curiously enough, it seems to me now, we forgot Mr. Carville. Perhaps that too helps to describe him, for he gave me the impression of being so utterly complete in himself, so very independent of the trivial human weaknesses and needs on which Christmas essentially depends, that a present to him was out of the question. We did not envy him this position. We simply forgot him in the general rush of seasonable sentiment, and put ourselves to all sorts of delightful inconvenience in discovering what his family would like. And when, later in the forenoon, as we were sitting round the studio stove, we heard a clatter of skates in the porch, and a single knock, as though some small person had stood atip-toe to reach the Canterbury Pilgrim, I am not ashamed to say we went down in a body to open the door. Messrs. Giuseppe Mazzini and Benvenuto Cellini stood without, the former with his sled over his shoulder, both muffled to the chin, their red cheeks and bright eyes beautiful to behold.

"Hullo!" I said. "Now, where did you get those?"

Benvenuto looked down critically at the new leather straps of the skates.

"Ma says," began Beppo, as though reciting a lesson, "Ma says, we thank you very much for the things and"—he glanced at his brother, who was watching him—"and we wish you a Merry Christmas."

"Thank you. Same to you," we said, filling the doorway. "Where are you going now?"

"Pine Street," said Beppo.

"Skates not much use now, eh?"

"Oh, he's just tryin' 'em," it was explained.

"Well, good luck. Eat plenty of turkey, and come and see us again soon."

They seemed hesitating about something, looking bashfully at each other and then at us. We all looked down at them benevolently.

"You come too," muttered Beppo, and Ben put his hand into mine with a charming gesture.

It was my turn to hesitate. Mac laughed.

"Come on, old man," he said. "We'll both go."

And we did. For two solid hours, oblivious of churchgoers, we slid down Pine Street and toiled up Pine Street, rejoicing in the keen air, the flying snow, and the delighted shouts of the youngsters.

"Now come in and have some candy," said we.

As we knocked the snow off our boots in the porch Bill came to the door looking pleasantly excited.

"She's here!" she whispered, and we entered, struck suddenly dumb like children, took off our boots and went upstairs to the studio.

Quite naturally, Mrs. Carville had stepped in to thank her neighbour for the little leather Renaissance purse we had made for her. She embarrassed us yet more by rising when we came in. My friend, a most courteous and punctilious gentleman, begged her to be seated. She was wearing her scarlet cloak, and her eloquent dusky features were illumined with conflicting emotions.

"I did not know," she said as I was getting the box of candy. "I did not know that people could be so kind."

"It is Christmas," explained my friend lightly. "And we always like to be jolly, you know. When is Mr. Carville due?"

A swift shadow crossed her face and was gone.

"How can I know?" she replied. "Perhaps next week, perhaps ... but I do not know."

"I was just saying," said Bill hurriedly, "what a pity he couldn't have got in for Christmas."

"Never," said Mrs. Carville, watching the children eating chocolates. "Never can he get in for Christmas. Every year it is the same since we are married. Always, always at sea."

She looked around at us vaguely, as though she feared, somehow, that we did not believe, or understand her. But I think we did. I think we saw suddenly the secret of this lonely woman's soul. We saw it as she looked round at us, the immediate and precipitous chasm between such a life as she led, and the life of one like my friend, ever close to her husband, understanding his whims, his fears, his hopes, his follies and his victories. We saw the desolation of the sea-wife, the long lonely nights, the ever-present apprehension of loss. We understood the pathos of the scaldino. And swift upon this new interpretation we saw the great dangers of such a life to a woman of imperfect culture, strong passion and yet noble aspiration. We saw, too, another and more particular tragedy possible to her, in being forever debarred from her husband's innermost life. That vague look of distress was pregnant with meaning. She wished to say—how much! Yet in English she had not the words. For a moment there was a silence, and then once more she rose, this time to bid us adieu. We were all under an impulse, I have since learned, to press her to stay to dinner. Each was doubtful how the others would take it, and with reason, for this one feast of the year has taken on a sacramental character in recent times. We prefer, without any diminution of our Christian charity and goodwill, to eat it by ourselves. And so Mrs. Carville bade us good-bye, and was followed unwillingly by two young gentlemen who wanted to stay.

"I'll come over this evening and bring Ben and Beppo for an hour, may I?" I said.

"You must not let them be in your way," she replied. The smile of the children was reward for a good deal of inconvenience.

"Mrs. Carville, you mustn't put it that way. We shall always be glad to have them, out of business hours. And to-night is holy to children everywhere. They shall light the candles on our tree. You know what Flaubert once said of children—'a little thing like that in the house is the only thing that matters.'"

Her eyes dropped to the heads of the children in front of her, and her face became suddenly grave, set in a pose of quiet thought.

"Did he say so?" she remarked soberly. "Well, perhaps he was right." And she took the children by the hand and went out.

And we had them back in the evening, which became uproarious. My friend greeted them dressed up as Santa Claus, with an immense cotton-wool beard and motor-goggles. We initiated them into the mysteries of Hunt the Slipper and Musical Chairs. Indeed, when neighbours began to drop in, as they did later on, they interrupted five children playing Nuts in May. Foolish old parlour-tricks we had forgotten since our own early childhood came back to memory and evoked shrieks of laughter. At ten, when I took them, well wrapped up, down our snow-trench and along the sidewalk to their own door, they were in a trance of mingled happiness and fatigue.

"Here they are, safe, Mrs. Carville," I said as she opened the door, "but very sleepy."

"You are very kind," she said. "They must go to bed. But you will come in, and drink a glass of wine? No?"

"Yes," I said, suddenly pushing aside the diffidence that years of literature had bred. "Yes, I will take a glass of wine with you, Mrs. Carville. To the coming year."

"Oh, but," she said, laughing over her shoulder as she led the way into the parlour, "Have you the gift of good fortune that you bring to me for this next year? I hope you have. Here is the wine. My husband gets it when he goes to Ancona. The wine of Umbria. You like it?"

"To next year," I said as she filled two glasses from a large wickered flask. "And what is left of this," I added. She sat on a white chair in front of a wall covered with books, a brilliant, tragic, yet smiling figure of a beautiful woman, charming in the kindly coquetry of the moment. For that is how I interpreted her mood, that she divined my diffidence with feminine quickness and sought innocently enough to help me along. And I made up my mind to take the chance, should it appear, and warn her of what we had feared. She would take it from me, knowing of my diffidence. As she sat there, she filled one of my ideals; the robust and beautiful mother. I will have none of your pale, puling madonnas. I have never been under the influence of women, but I delight in them tall and strong and with the splendid beauty of health and maturity. Against her husband's books, which made a background of colour and gold like old tapestry for her head, she was a wonderful complexity of vigorous, abounding life and still decorative outline. She turned and looked at me after setting down her glass and found me watching her. She smiled in a friendly way.

"You know," she said, "we have bought a home on Staten Island? Well, when we are fixed, you will come and see us—when my husband is home. You will, all?"

"I will anyhow," I said. "I like your husband and I like your two boys, and...."

"And me?" she inquired with a smile that pursed her lips. "You no like me?" I laughed.

"I did not say that," I observed. "How could it be otherwise? Even though you will be offended, I must wonder if you know how much you mean to him."

"To him?" she echoed vaguely, in alarm.

"To your husband," I went on. "You see, he has told me a good deal of his life. And I think you have made all the difference in it. He is not a noisy man, you know, but he made it very clear at times how very much you mean to him."

She was looking at me steadily while I said this, stroking little Ben's head as he slumbered. Her eyes were very bright, and they searched my face relentlessly.

"And you think I do not know that?" she asked slowly.

"You will think me presumptuous to have said so much. You must forgive a shy man who means no ill. Of course, you know that. What I pray for this coming year is that you will not forget it."

There was a long silence, and I fixed my eyes on a brass ash-tray and a row of corn-cobs that stood on a little table by the radiator. At length she rose and gently lifted the children to their feet, holding them close to her.

"You think bad of me, then?" she queried in a curiously toneless voice.

"Who? I?"

"All of you."

"You know we do not. You must blame only me for this. We think bad of you! Listen, Mrs. Carville. My business is with books and you may think I know nothing of the life you and your husband live. But my business is also with humanity. It is for humanity I live, for them I work, and their praise is my reward. I am, in a way, in love with humanity. All the time I want people. They are the only thing that matters. And this gives me a light on a good deal you might think I missed. I know how quickly people break and are carried away. I know the strongest are often the weakest. I know we often give way just when we feel strong. I know something of illusions. So I have spoken. To-morrow you will laugh and say, 'It don't matter what he thinks,' And I still wish you a Happy New Year. Will you wish me one? Because I love people, humanity, so much?" And I made my way, rather overcome by feeling, out to the hall. As I raised the latch to go out, I looked back at her. She stood at the parlour door, the light of the hall-lamp throwing her features into sharp relief.

"Wait," she said softly. I waited.

"You think bad of me?" she said again. "Why, what have I done?"

"No!" I said. "You wrong us. We should not dare ..."

"Surely," she replied, looking at me in an odd, arch manner. "So I was thinking. Good night. It is Christmas. I do not think bad of you. Good night."

And then I was running through the snow.

I did not recount this conversation in all its details to the supper party I found in the studio. I wanted to think it out. I wanted to recall and consider this—to me—very unusual interview with a married woman. I was reminded, as I lay unsleeping that night, of Mr. Carville's enigmatic saying that 'the things in books had always eluded him.' As one with a certain interest in books, I had remembered his words. And it seemed that, if I looked at life honestly, the things in books would elude me too. The problem occupied me for days. I was aghast at my own obtuseness, for I was unable to decide from Mrs. Carville's conduct what her real attitude towards us might be. I did not know whether she were wayward or not. I felt bitterly that such things could not happen in a book, in a best seller.

And when the days passed, white shrouded, and we discussed the theories we had made and demolished, I found to my astonishment that my friends had taken up a remote position on the subject. They were extremely doubtful about my story of the auto. Most likely, said they, it was a late Store delivery van. I had imagined so much. They paid detestable tribute to my imaginative powers. Married people are like this. With disconcerting abruptness, they wheel round together and go off at some incalculable tangent, serenely unconscious of any need for explanation. They made matters worse by harping on my imagination. And they capped all by declaring that I was a bad man and hoped I would keep my evil thoughts to myself at the Festive Season.

It is here that Miss Fraenkel interposed, all unconsciously, and became the cause of our presence at a most singular catastrophe, the collapse of the aeroplane in the snow. For had we not gone out that night to visit Miss Fraenkel and with her see the New Year safely born, we should have had no vivid memory of that terrible descent, nor understood how Fate had woven our neighbours' destinies, and how inexplicably she can drive to ruin at the moment of victory.

My friends had been to New York during the day, I remember, visiting friends in Lexington Avenue, and they mentioned at dinner a report in the paper that Mr. Francis Lord was to fly from the Gottschalk grounds, on the banks of Lake Champlain, to New York and give a demonstration of the aeroplane over the city. New machines had come from England, hope sprang eternal in the reporting breast, and events of staggering scientific import were foreshadowed. Other experts were pessimistic. They claimed their own apparatus was better than D'Aubigne's and so got a little advertisement for themselves. Other experts again blamed the administration in a vague way. An eminent actress was interviewed and spoke of her new telephone play without adding much to the national stock of wisdom. A famous evangelist of the rough-house type proposed to use the new apparatus for reaching distant settlements.

I don't think we took the news very seriously. We are, as I have said, inured to wonders and inclined to let science do her worst. We belong to that class of people who, although they keep silent on the subject, hate science very heartily. My friend trumpets science loudly enough at times, I know; but he hates her in his heart, for he loves children and birds and flowers, and the colours of the distant hills when evening falls. And like us, he admires Miss Fraenkel, perhaps the most unscientific creature in the United States. He feeds her passion for details of English life in the most shameless way. On this particular evening he entranced her with a description of the Scottish custom of sitting on the plinth of St. Paul's Cathedral in London and welcoming the new year with bottles of whisky. Every Scotsman south of the Tweed was under oath to appear in the churchyard in kilts and tartan-plaid at midnight. Most of them, he added, wore red beards. Miss Fraenkel's fine hazel eyes grew round as she visualized this frightful throng gathered among the graves of the churchyard. It occurred to me that it only showed, after all, how difficult it is to convey in words a just notion of a foreign land, and how easy it is for "travellers' tales" to become incredible fabrications. How would the quiet townships of rural England, where the names of people and places go back to Saxon days, credit us if we told them of our tavern known as Slovitzsky's, where citizens, of all the races of Europe, sang "Auld lang Syne"? Not in kilts, it is true, but in costumes even more surprising to the aforesaid quiet townships. We get a good deal of fun out of Miss Fraenkel, no doubt, but it may be that she, without ever giving away the secret, gets a good deal of fun out of us. Sometimes there is a whimsical glint in her hazel eyes that makes me reflect....