It clouded his excitement. His thought was, "Damn it, I hope she isn't bullying Effie."

He had the luck almost at once to jump a lorry that would lift him a long bit on his road, and the driver felicitated him with envious cheerfulness on being off for "leaf." He would have responded with immense heartiness before reading that letter. With Mabel's tart sentences in his mind a certain gloom, a rather vexed gloom, bestrode him. Her words presented her aspect and her attitude and her atmosphere with a reminiscent flavour that took the edge off his eagerness for home. On the road when the lorry had dropped him, on the interminable journey in the train, on the boat, the feeling remained with him. England—England!—merged into view across the water, and he was astonished, as his heart bounded for joy at Folkestone coming into sight, to realise from what depression of mind it bounded away. He was ashamed of himself and perturbed with himself that he had not more relished the journey: the journey that was the most glorious thing in the dreams of every man in France. He thought, "Well, what am I coming home to?"

The train went speeding through the English fields,—dear, familiar, English lands, sodden and bare and unspeakably exquisite to him in their December mood. He gazed upon them, flooding all his heart out to them. He thought, "Why should there be anything to make me feel depressed? Why should things be the same as they used to be? But dash that letter.... Dash it, I hope she's not been bullying that girl."

V

He made rather a boisterous entry into the house on his arrival, arriving in the morning before breakfast. He entered the hall just after eight o'clock and announced himself with a loud, "Hullo, everybody!" and thumped the butt of his rifle on the floor. An enormous crash in the kitchen and a shriek of "It's the master!" heralded the tumultuous discharge upon him of High Jinks and Low Jinks. Effie appeared from the dining room. He was surrounded and enthusiastically shaking hands. "Hullo, you Jinkses! Isn't this ripping? By Jove, High—and Low—it's famous to see you again. Hullo, Effie! Just fancy you being here! How jolly fine, eh? High Jinks, I want the most enormous breakfast you've ever cooked. Got any kippers? Good girl. That's the stuff to give the troops. Where's the Mistress? Not down yet? I'll go up. Low Jinks—Low Jinks, I'm dashed if you aren't crying! Well, it is jolly nice to see you again, Low. How's the old bike? Look here, Low, I want the most boiling bath—"

He broke off. "Hullo, Mabel! Hullo! Did you get my letter? I'm coming up."

Mabel was in a wrapper at the head of the stairs. He ran up. "I'm simply filthy. Do you mind?" He took her hand.

She said, "I never dreamt you'd be here at this hour. How are you, Mark? Yes, I got your letter. But I never expected you till this evening. It's very annoying that nothing is ready for you. Sarah, something is burning in the kitchen. I shouldn't stand there, Rebecca, with so much to be done; and I think you've forgotten your cap. Miss Bright,—oh, she's gone."

Just the same Mabel! But he wasn't going to let her be the same! He had made up his mind to that as he had come along with eager strides from the station. She turned to him and they exchanged their greetings and he went on, pursuing his resolution, "Look here, I've got a tremendous idea. When I get through this cadet business I shall have quite a bit of leave and my Sam Browne belt. I thought we'd go up to town and stick up at an hotel—the Savoy or somewhere—and have no end of a bust. Theatres and all the rest of it. Shall we?"

That chilly, vexed manner of hers, caused as he well knew by the uproar of his arrival, disappeared. "Oh, I'd love to. Yes, do let's. Now you want a bath, don't you? I'm annoyed there was all that disturbance just when I was meeting you. I've been having a little trouble lately—"

"Oh, well, never mind that now, Mabel. Come and watch me struggle out of this pack. Yes, look here, as soon as ever I know for certain when the course ends we'll write for rooms at the Savoy. I hear you have to do it weeks ahead. We'll spend pots of money and have no end of a time."

She reflected his good spirits. Ripping! He splashed and wallowed in the bath, singing lustily one of the songs out there:

"Ho, ho, ho, it's a lovely war!"

VI

But the three days at home were not to go on this singing note. They were marred by the discovery that his suspicion was well founded; she was bullying Effie. He began to notice it at once. Effie, with whom he had anticipated a lot of fun, was different: not nearly so bright; subdued; her eyes, not always, but only by occasional flashes, sparkling that intense appreciation of the oddities of life that had so much attracted him in her. Yes, dash it, Mabel was treating her in a rotten way. Bullying. No, it was not exactly bullying, it was snubbing, a certain acid quality always present in Mabel's voice when she addressed her,—that and a manner of always being what he thought of as "at her." The girl seemed to have an astonishing number of quite trivial duties to perform—trivial; there certainly was no suggestion of her being imposed upon as he had always felt Miss Bypass up at the vicarage was imposed upon, but Mabel was perpetually and acidly "at her" over one trivial thing or another. It was forever, "Miss Bright, I think you ought to be in the morning room, oughtn't you?" "Miss Bright, I really must ask you not to leave your door open every time you come out of your room. You know how I dislike the doors standing open." "Miss Bright, if you've finished your tea, there's really no need for you to remain."

He hated it. He said nothing, but it was often on the tip of his tongue to say something, and he showed that he intensely disliked it, and he knew that Mabel knew he disliked it. On the whole it was rather a relief when the three days were up and he went down to the Cadet battalion at Cambridge.

In March he came back, a second lieutenant; and immediately, when in time to come he looked back, things set in train for that ultimate encounter with life which was awaiting him.

The projected visit to town did not come off. While he was at Cambridge Mabel wrote to say that the Garden Home Amateur Dramatic Society was going to do "His Excellency The Governor" in aid of the Red Cross funds at the end of March. She was taking part, she was fearfully excited about it, and as rehearsals began early in the month she naturally could not be away. She was sure he would understand and would not mind.

He did not mind in the least. They were years past the stage when it would have so much as crossed his mind that she might give up this engagement for the sake of spending his leave on a bit of gaiety in town; he had only suggested the idea on her account; personally he much preferred the prospect of doing long walks about his beloved countryside now passing into spring.

VII

Arriving, he began at once to do so. He went over for one visit to the office at Tidborough. Not so much enthusiasm greeted him as to encourage a second. Twyning and Mr. Fortune were immersed in adapting the workshops to war work for the Government. Normal business was coming to a standstill. Now Twyning had conceived the immense, patriotic, and profitable idea of making aeroplane parts, and it was made sufficiently clear to Sabre that, so long away and immediately to be off again, there could be no interest for him in the enterprise.

"You won't want to go into all we are doing, my dear fellow," said Mr. Fortune. "Your hard-earned leave, eh? We mustn't expect you to give it up to business, eh, Twyning?"

And Twyning responded, "No, no, old man. Not likely, old man. Well, it's jolly to see you in the office again"; and he looked at his watch and said a word to Mr. Fortune about "Meeting that man" with an air which quite clearly informed Sabre that it would be jollier still to see him put on his cap and walk out of the office again.

Well, it was only what he had expected; a trifle pronounced, perhaps, but the obvious sequel to their latter-day manner towards him: they had wanted to get him out; he was out and they desired to keep him out.

He rose to go. "Oh, that's all right. I'm not going to keep you. I only called in to show off my officer's uniform."

Twyning said, "Yes, congratulations again, old man." He laughed. "You mustn't think you're going to have Harold saluting you though, if you ever meet. He's getting a commission too." His manner, directly he began to speak of Harold, changed to that enormous affection and admiration for his son which Sabre well remembered on the occasion of Harold joining up. His face shone, his mouth trembled with loving pride at what Harold had been through and what he had done. And he was such a good boy,—wrote twice a week to his mother and once when he was sick in hospital the Padre of his battalion had written to say what a good and sterling boy he was. Yes, he had been recommended for a commission and was coming home that month to a Cadet battalion at Bournemouth.

When Sabre made his congratulations Twyning accompanied him downstairs to the street and warmly shook his hand. "Thanks, old man; thanks most awfully. Yes, he's everything to me, my Harold. And of course it's a strain never knowing.... Well, well, he's in God's hands; and he's such a good, earnest boy."

Extraordinarily different Twyning the father of Harold, and Twyning in daily relations.

VIII

His leave drew on. He might get his orders any day now. Mabel was much occupied with her rehearsals. He spent his time in long walks alone and, whenever they were possible, in the old evenings with Mr. Fargus. In Mabel's absence he and Effie were much thrown together. Mabel frequently came upon them thus together, and when she did she had a mannerism that somehow seemed to suggest "catching" them together. And sometimes she used that expression. It would have been uncommonly jolly to have had Bright Effie as companion on the walks, and once or twice he did. But Mabel showed very clearly that this was very far from having her approval and on the second occasion said so. There was the slightest possible little tiff about it; and thenceforward—the subject having been opened—there were frequent little passages over Effie, arising always out of his doing what Mabel called "forever sticking up for her." How frequent they were, and how much they annoyed Mabel, he did not realise until, in the last week of his leave, and in the midst of a sticking up for her scene, Mabel surprisingly announced, "Well, anyway I'm sick and tired of the girl, and I'm sick and tired of having you always sticking up for her, and I'm going to get rid of her—to-morrow."

He said, "To-morrow? How can you? I don't say it's not the best thing to do. She's pretty miserable, I should imagine, the way you're always picking at her, but you can't rush her off like that, Mabel."

"Well, I'm going to. I'm going to pay her up and let her go."

"But, Mabel—what will her people think?"

"I'm sure I don't care what they think. If you're so concerned about the precious girl, I'll tell her mother that I was going to make other arrangements in any case and that as this was your last week we thought we'd like to be alone together. Will that satisfy you?"

"I hope it will satisfy them. And I hope very much indeed that you won't do it."

IX

But she did do it. On the following day Effie left. Sabre, pretending to know nothing about it, went for a long walk all day. When he returned Effie had gone. He said nothing. Her name was not again mentioned between him and Mabel. It happened that the only reference to her sudden departure in which he was concerned was with Twyning.

Setting out on his return to France—his orders were to join a Fusilier battalion, reporting to 34th Division—he found Twyning on the platform at Tidborough station buying a paper.

"Hullo, old man," said Twyning. "Just off? I say, old man, old Bright's very upset about Effie getting the sack from your place like that. How was it?"

He felt himself flush. Beastly, having to defend Mabel's unfairness like this. "Oh, I fancy my wife had the idea of getting some relation to live with her, that's all."

Twyning was looking keenly at him. "Oh, I see. But a bit sudden, wasn't it? I mean to say, I thought you were on such friendly terms with the girl. Why, only a couple of days before she left I saw you with her having tea in the Cloister tea rooms. I don't think you saw me, did you, old man?"

"No, I didn't. Yes, I remember; we were waiting for my wife. There'd been a dress rehearsal of this play down at the Corn Exchange."

"Oh, yes, waiting for your wife, were you?" Twyning appeared to be thinking. "Well, that's what I mean, old man. So friendly with the girl—both of you—and then sending her off so suddenly like that."

Sabre essayed to laugh it off. "My wife's rather a sudden person, you know."

Twyning joined very heartily in the laugh. "Is she?" He looked around. "She's seeing you off, I suppose?"

"No, she's not. She's not too well. Got a rotten cold."

Twyning stared again in what struck Sabre as rather an odd way. "Oh, I'm sorry, old man. Nothing much, I hope. Well, you'll want to be getting in. I'll tell old Bright what you say about Effie. Nothing in it. I quite understand. Seemed a bit funny at first, that's all. Good-by, old man. Jolly good luck. Take care of yourself. Jolly good luck."

He put out his hand and squeezed Sabre's in his intensely friendly grip; and destiny put out its hand and added another and a vital hour to Sabre's ultimate encounter with life.

X

His leave ended with the one thing utterly unexpected and flagrantly impossible. One of those meetings so astounding in the fact that the deviation of a single minute, of half a minute, of what one has been doing previously would have prevented it; and out of it one of those frightful things that ought to come with premonition, by hints, by stages, but that come careering headlong as though malignity, bitter and wanton, had loosed a savage bolt.

He arranged to spend the night at the Officers' Rest House near Victoria station. Arriving about nine and disinclined for food, he strolled up to St. James's Park and walked about a little, then back to the station and into the yard to buy a paper. He stood on a street refuge to let by a cab coming out of the station. As it passed he saw its occupants—two women; and one saw him—Nona! Of all incredible things, Nona!

She stopped the cab and he hurried after it.

"Nona!"

"Marko!"

She said, "I'm hurrying to Euston to catch a train. Tony's mother is with me."

He could not see her well in the dim light, but he thought she looked terribly pale and fatigued. And her manner odd. He said, "I'm just going back. But you, Nona? I thought you were in France?"

"I was—this morning. I only came over to-day."

How funny her voice was. "Nona, you look ill. You sound ill. What's up? Is anything wrong?"

She said, "Oh, Marko, Tony's killed."

"Nona!"

... That came careering headlong, as though malignity, bitter and wanton, had loosed a savage bolt.

Tybar killed! The cab was away and he was standing there. Tybar killed. She had said they were hurrying to Scotland, to Tony's home. Tybar killed! He was getting in people's way. He went rather uncertainly to the railings bounding the pavement where he stood, and leaned against them and stared across into the dim cavern of the station yard. Tybar dead....[2]

[Footnote 2: At a much later date Nona told Sabre of Tony's death:

"It was in that advance of ours. Just before Vimy Ridge. At Arras. Marko, he was shot down leading his men. He wouldn't let them take him away. Re was cheering them on. And then he was hit again. He was terribly wounded. Oh, terribly. They got him down to the clearing station. They didn't think he could possibly live. But you know how wonderful he always was. Even in death that extraordinary spirit of his.... They got him to Boulogne. I was there and I heard quite by chance."

"You saw him, Nona?"

She nodded. "Just before he died. He couldn't speak. But he'd been speaking just before I came. He left a message with the nurse."

She drew a long breath. "Marko, the nurse gave me the message. She thought it was for me—and it wasn't."

She wiped her eyes. "He was watching us. I know he knew she was telling me, and his eyes—you know that mocking kind of look they used to have? Poor Tony! It was there. He died like that.... Marko, you know I'm very glad he just had his old mocking way while he died. Now it's over I'm glad. I wouldn't have had him sorry and unhappy just when he was dying. He was just utterly untouched by anything all his life, not to be judged as ordinary people are judged, and I know perfectly well he'd have wished to go out just his mocking, careless self to the last. He was utterly splendid. All that was between us, that was nothing once the war came. Always think kindly of him, Marko."

Sabre said, "I do. I've never been able but to admire him." She said, "Every one did Poor Tony. Brave Tony!"]

XI

On the following morning he crossed to France, there to take up again that strange identity in whose occupancy his own self was held in abeyance, waiting his return. Seven months passed before he returned to that waiting identity and he resumed it then permanently,—done with the war. The tremendous fighting of 1917—his participation in the war—his tenancy of the strange personality caught up in the enormous machinery of it all—ended for him in the great break through of the Hindenburg Line in November. On top of a recollection of sudden shock, then of whirling giddiness in which he was conscious of some enormous violence going on but could not feel it—like (as he afterwards thought) beginning to come to in the middle of a tooth extraction under gas—on the top of these and of extraordinary things and scenes and people he could not at all understand came some one saying:

"Well, it's good-by to the war for you, old man."

He knew that he was aware—and somehow for some time had been aware—that he was in a cot in a ship. He said, "I got knocked out, didn't I?"

... Some one was telling him some interminable story about some one being wounded in the shoulder and in the knee. He said, and his voice appeared to him to be all jumbled up and thick, "Well, I don't care a damn."

... Some one laughed.

Years—or minutes—after this he was talking to a nurse. He said, "What did some one say to me about it being good-by to the war for me?"

The nurse smiled. "Well, poor thing, you've got it rather badly in the knee, you know."

He puzzled over this. Presently he said, "Where are we?"

The nurse bent across the cot and peered through the port; then beamed down on him:

"England!"

She said, "Aren't you glad? What's the matter?"

His face was contracted in intensity of thought, extraordinary thought: he felt the most extraordinary premonition of something disastrous awaiting him: there was in his mind, meaninglessly, menacingly, over and over again, "Good luck have thee with thine honour ... and thy right hand shall show thee terrible things...."

"Terrible things!"



PART FOUR

MABEL—EFFIE—NONA



CHAPTER I

I

Said Hapgood—that garrulous Hapgood, solicitor, who first in this book spoke of Sabre to a mutual friend—said Hapgood, seated in the comfortable study of his fiat, to that same friend, staying the night:

"Well, now, old man, about Sabre. Well, I tell you it's a funny business—a dashed funny business, the position old Puzzlehead Sabre has got himself into. Of course you, with your coarse and sordid instincts, will say it's just what it appears to be and a very old story at that. Whereas to me, with my exquisitely delicate susceptibilities.... No, don't throw that, old man. Sorry. I'll be serious. What I want just to kick off with is that you know as well as I do that I've never been the sort of chap who wept he knows not why; I've never nursed a tame gazelle or any of that sort of stuff. In fact I've got about as much sentiment in me as there is in a pound of lard. But when I see this poor beggar Sabre as he is now, and when I hear him talk as he talked to me about his position last week, and when I see how grey and ill he looks, hobbling about on his old stick, well, I tell you, old man, I get—well, look here, here it is from the Let Go.

"Look here, this is April, April, 1918, by all that's Hunnish—dashed nearly four years of this infernal war. Well, old Sabre got knocked out in France just about five months ago, back in November. He copped it twice—shoulder and knee. Shoulder nothing much; knee pretty bad. Thought they'd have to take his leg off, one time. Thought better of it, thanks be; patched him up; discharged him from the Army; and sent him home—very groggy, only just able to put the bad leg to the ground, crutches, and going to be a stick and a bit of a limp all his life. Poor old Puzzlehead. Think yourself lucky you were a Conscientious Objector, old man.... Oh, damn you, that hurt.

"Very well. That's as he was when I first saw him again. Just making first attempts in the stick and limp stage, poor beggar. That was back in February. Early in February. Mark the date, as they say in the detective stories. I can't remember what the date was, but never you mind. You just mark it. Early in February, two months ago. There was good old me down in Tidborough on business—good old me doing the heavy London solicitor in a provincial town—they always put down a red carpet for me at the station, you know; rather decent, don't you think?—and remembering about old Sabre having been wounded and discharged, blew into Fortune, East and Sabre's (business wasn't with them this time) for news of him.

"Of course he wasn't there. Saw old Fortune and the man Twyning and found them in regard to Sabre about as genial and communicative as a maiden aunt over a married sister's new dress. Old Fortune looking like a walking pulpit in a thundercloud—I should say he'd make about four of me round the equator; and mind you, a chap stopped me in the street the other day and offered me a job as Beefeater outside a moving-picture show: yes, fact, I was wretchedly annoyed about it—and the man Twyning with a lean and hungry look like Cassius, or was it Judas Iscariot? Well, like Cassius out of a job or Judas Iscariot in the middle of one, anyway. That's Twyning's sort. Chap I never cottoned on to a bit. They'd precious little to say about Sabre. Sort of handed out the impression that he'd been out of the business so long that really they weren't much in touch with his doings. Rather rotten, I thought it, seeing that the poor beggar had done his bit in the war and done it pretty thoroughly too. They said that really they hardly knew when he'd be fit to get back to work again; not just yet awhile, anyway. And, yes, he was at home over at Penny Green, so far as they knew,—in the kind of tone that they didn't know much and cared less: at least, that was the impression they gave me; only my fancy, I daresay, as the girl said when she thought the soldier sat a bit too close to her in the tram.

"Well, I'd nothing to do till my train pulled out in the afternoon, so I hopped it over to Penny Green Garden Home on the railway and walked down to old Sabre's to scoop a free lunch off him. Found him a bit down the road from his house trying out this game leg of his. By Jove, he was no end bucked to see me. Came bounding along, dot and carry one, beaming all over his old phiz, and wrung my honest hand as if he was Robinson Crusoe discovering Man Friday on a desert island. I know I'm called Popular Percy by thousands who can only admire me from afar, but I tell you old Sabre fairly overwhelmed me. And talk! He simply jabbered. I said, 'By Jove, Sabre, one would think you hadn't met any one for a month the way you're unbelting the sacred rites of welcome.' He laughed and said, 'Well, you see, I'm a bit tied to a post with this leg of mine.'

"'How's the wife?' said I.

"'She's fine,' said he. 'You'll stay to lunch? I say, Hapgood, you will stay to lunch, won't you?'

"I told him that's what I'd come for; and he seemed no end relieved,—so relieved that I think I must have cocked my eye at him or something, because he said in an apologetic sort of way, 'I mean, because my wife will be delighted. It's a bit dull for her nowadays, only me and always me, crawling about more or less helpless.'

"It struck me afterwards—oh, well, never mind that now. I said, 'I suppose she's making no end of a fuss over you now, hero of the war, and all that sort of thing?'

"'Oh, rather!' says old Sabre, and a minute or two later, as if he hadn't said it heartily enough, 'Oh, rather. Rather, I should think so.'"

II

"Well, we staggered along into the house, old Sabre talking away like a soda-water bottle just uncorked, and he took me into a room on the ground floor where they'd put up a bed for him, him not being able to do the stairs, of course. 'This is my—my den,' he introduced it, 'where I sit about and read and try to do a bit of work.'

"There didn't look to be much signs of either that I could see, and I said so. And old Sabre, who'd been hobbling about the room in a rather uncomfortable sort of way, exclaimed suddenly, 'I say, Hapgood, it's absolutely ripping having you here talking like this. I never can settle down properly in this room, and I've got a jolly place upstairs where all my books and things are.'

"'Let's go up then,' I said.

"'I can't get up.'

"'Well, man alive, I can get you up. Come on. Let's go.'

"He seemed to hesitate for some reason I couldn't understand. 'It's got to be in a chair,' he said. 'It's a business. I wonder—' That kind of thing, as though it was something he oughtn't to do. 'But it would be fine,' he said. 'I've not been up for days. I could show you some of my history I'm going to take up again one of these days—one of these days,' said he, with his nut rather wrinkled up. And then suddenly, 'Come on, let's go!'

"At the door he called out, 'I say, you Jinkses!' and two servant girls came tumbling out rather as if they were falling out of a trap and each trying to fall out first. 'I say,' old Sabre says, 'Mistress not back yet, is she?' and when they told him No, 'Well', d'you think you'd like to get me upstairs on that infernal chair?' he says.

"'Oh, we will, sir,' and they got out one of those invalid chairs and started to lift him up. Course I wanted to take one end, but they wouldn't hear of it. 'If you please, we like carrying the master, sir,' and all that kind of thing; and they fussed him in and fiddled with his legs, snapping at one another for being rough as if they were the two women taking their disputed baby up to old Solomon.

"They'd scarcely got on to the stairs when the front door opened and in walks his wife. My word, I thought they were going to drop him. She says in a voice as though she was biting a chip off an ice block, 'Mark, is it really necessary—' Then she saw me and took her teeth out of the ice. 'Oh, it's Mr. Hapgood, isn't it? How very nice! Staying to lunch, of course? Do let's come into the drawing-room.' Very nice and affable. I always rather liked her. And we went along, I being rather captured and doing the polite in my well-known matinee idol manner, you understand; and I heard old Sabre saying, 'Well, let me out of the damned thing, can't you? Help me out of the damn thing'; and presently hobbled in and joined us, and soon after that lunch, exquisitely cooked and served and all very nice, too.

"Well, as I say, old man, I always rather liked his wife. I—always—rather—liked—her. But somehow, as we went on through lunch, and then on after that, I didn't like her quite so much. Not—quite—so—much. I don't know. Have you ever seen a woman unpicking a bit of sewing? Always looks rather angry with it, I suppose because it's got to be unpicked. They sort of flip the threads out, as much as to say, 'Come out of it, drat you. That's you, drat you.' Well, that was the way she spoke to old Sabre. Sort of snipped off the end of what he was saying and left it hanging, if you follow me. That was the way she spoke to him when she did speak to him. But for the most part they hardly spoke to one another at all. I talked to her, or I talked to him, but the conversation never got triangular. Whenever it threatened to, snip! she'd have his corner off and leave him floating. Tell you what it was, old man, I jolly soon saw that the reason old Sabre was so jolly anxious for me to stay to lunch was because meals without dear old me or some other chatty intellectual were about as much like a feast of reason and a flow of soul as a vinegar bottle and a lukewarm potato on a cold plate. Similarly with the exuberance of his greeting of me. I hate to confess it, but it wasn't so much splendid old me he had been so delighted to see as any old body to whom he could unloose his tongue without having the end of his nose snipped off.

"Mind you, I don't mean that he was cowed and afraid to open his mouth in his wife's presence. Nothing a bit like that. What I got out of it was that he was starved, intellectually starved, mentally starved, starved of the good old milk of human kindness—that's what I mean. Everything he put up he threw down, not because she wanted to snub him, but because she either couldn't or wouldn't take the faintest interest in anything that interested him. Course, she may have had jolly good reason. I daresay she had. Still, there it was, and it seemed rather rotten to me. I didn't like it. Damn it, the chap only had one decent leg under the table and an uncommonly tired-looking face above it, and I felt rather sorry for him."

III

"After lunch I said, 'Well, now, old man, what about going up to this room of yours and having a look at this monumental history?' Saw him shoot a glance in his wife's direction, and he said, 'Oh, no, not now, Hapgood. Never mind now.' And his wife said, 'Mark, what can there be for Mr. Hapgood to see up there? It's too ridiculous. I'm sure he doesn't want to be looking at lesson books.'

"I said, 'Oh, but I'd like to. In fact, I insist. None of your backing out at the last minute, Sabre. I know your little games.'

"Sort of carried it off like that, d'you see; knowing perfectly well the old chap was keen on going up, and seeing perfectly clearly that for some extraordinary reason his wife stopped him going up.

"By Jove, he was pleased, I could see he was. We got in the maids and upped him, to a room he used to sleep in, I gathered, and up there he hobbled about, taking out this book and dusting up that book, and fiddling over his table, and looking out of the window, for all the world like an evicted emigrant restored to the home of his fathers.

"He said, 'Forgive me, old man, just a few minutes; you know I haven't been up here for over three weeks.'

"I said, 'Why the devil haven't you, then?'

"'Oh, well,' says he. 'Oh, well, it makes a business in the house, you know, heaving me up.'

"Well, that didn't cut any ice, you know, seeing that I'd seen the servants rush to the job as if they were going to a school treat. It was perfectly clear to me that the reason he was kept out of the room was because his wife didn't want him being lugged up there; and for all I knew never had liked him being there and now was able to stop it.

"However, his wife was his funeral, not mine, and I said nothing and presently he settled himself down and we began talking. At least he did. He's got some ideas, old Sabre has. He didn't talk about the war. He talked a lot about the effect of the war, on people and on institutions, and that sort of guff. Devilish deep, devilishly interesting. I won't push it on to you. You're one of those soulless, earth-clogged natures.

"Tell you one thing, though, just to give you an idea of the way he's been developing all these years. He talked about how sickened he was with all this stuff in the papers and in the pulpits about how the nation, in this war, is passing through the purging fires of salvation and is going to emerge with higher, nobler, purer ideals, and all that. He said not so. He quoted a thing at me out of one of his books. Something about (as well as I can remember it) something about how 'Those waves of enthusiasm on whose crumbling crests we sometimes see nations lifted for a gleaming moment are wont to have a gloomy trough before and behind.' And he said:

"'That's what it is with us, Hapgood. We've been high on those crests in this war and already they're crumbling. When the peace comes, you look out for the glide down into the trough. They talk about the nation, under this calamity, turning back to the old faiths, to the old simple beliefs, to the old earnest ways, to the old God of their fathers. Man,' he said, 'what can you see already? Temples everywhere to a new God—Greed—Profit—Extortion. All out for it. All out for it,' I remember him saying, 'all out to get the most and do the least.'

"He got up and hobbled about, excited, flushed, and talked like a man who uses his headpiece for thinking. 'Where's that making to, Hapgood?' he asked. 'I'll tell you,' he said. 'You'll get the people finding there's a limit to the high prices they can demand for their labour: apparently none to those the employers can go on piling up for their profits. You'll get growing hatred by the middle classes with fixed incomes of the labouring classes whose prices for their labour they'll see—and feel—going up and up; and you'll get the same growing hatred by the labouring classes for the capitalists. We've been nearly four years on the crest, Hapgood,—on the crest of the war—and it's been all classes as one class for the common good. I tell you, Hapgood, the trough's ahead; we're steering for it; and it's rapid and perilous sundering of the classes.

"'The new God,' old Sabre said. 'High prices, high prices: the highest that can be squeezed. Temples to it everywhere. Ay, and sacrifices, Hapgood. Immolations. Offering up of victims. No thought of those who cannot pay the prices. Pay the prices, or get them, or go under. That's the new God's creed.'

"I said to him, 'What's the remedy, Sabre?'

"He said to me, 'Hapgood, the remedy's the old remedy. The old God. But it's more than that. It's Light: more light. The old revelation was good for the old world, and suited to the old world, and told in terms of the old world's understanding. Mystical for ages steeped in the mystical; poetic for minds receptive of nothing beyond story and allegory and parable. We want a new revelation in terms of the new world's understanding. We want light, light! Do you suppose a man who lives on meat is going to find sustenance in bread and milk? Do you suppose an age that knows wireless and can fly is going to find spiritual sustenance in the food of an age that thought thunder was God speaking? Man's done with it. It means nothing to him; it gives nothing to him. He turns all that's in him to get all he wants out of this world and let the next go rip. Man cannot live by bread alone, the churches tell him; but he says, "I am living on bread alone, and doing well on it." But I tell you, Hapgood, that plumb down in the crypt and abyss of every man's soul is a hunger, a craving for other food than this earthy stuff. And the churches know it; and instead of reaching down to him what he wants—light, light—instead of that, they invite him to dancing and picture shows, and you're a jolly good fellow, and religion's a jolly fine thing and no spoilsport, and all that sort of latter-day tendency. Damn it, he can get all that outside the churches and get it better. Light, light! He wants light, Hapgood. And the padres come down and drink beer with him, and watch boxing matches with him, and sing music-hall songs with him, and dance Jazz with him, and call it making religion a Living Thing in the Lives of the People. Lift the hearts of the people to God, they say, by showing them that religion is not incompatible with having a jolly fine time. And there's no God there that a man can understand for him to be lifted up to. Hapgood, a man wouldn't care what he had to give up if he knew he was making for something inestimably precious. But he doesn't know. Light, light—that's what he wants; and the longer it's withheld the lower he'll sink. Light! Light!'"

IV

"Well, I make no extra charge for that (said Hapgood, and helped himself to a drink). That's not me. That's Sabre. And if you'd seen him as I saw him, and if you'd heard him as I heard him, you'd have been as impressed as I was impressed instead of lolling there like a surfeited python. I tell you, old Sabre was all pink under his skin, and his eyes shining, and his voice tingling. I tell you, if you were a real painter instead of a base flatterer of bloated and wealthy sitters, and if you'd seen him then, you'd have painted the masterpiece of your age and called it The Visionary. I tell you, old Sabre was fine. He said he'd been thinking all round that sort of stuff for years, and that now, for one reason and another, it was beginning to crystallize in him and take form and substance.

"I asked him, 'What reasons, Sabre?' and he said, 'Oh, I don't know. The war; and being out there; and thinking about the death of an old woman I attended once; and things I picked up from a slip of a girl; and things from a woman I know—oh, all sorts of things, Hapgood; and I tell you what chiefly—loneliness, my God, loneliness....'

"I didn't say anything. What could I say? When a chap suddenly rips a cry out of his heart like that, what the devil can you say if you weigh fourteen stone of solid contentment and look it? You can only feel you weren't meant to hear and try to look as if you hadn't.

"Well, anyway, time came for me to go and I went. Sabre stayed where he was. Would I mind leaving him up there? It was so seldom he got up; and talking with me had brought back old feelings he thought he'd never recapture again, and he was going to see if he couldn't start in and do a bit of writing again. So I pulled out and left him; and that was old Sabre as I saw him two months ago; and one way and another I thought a good deal coming back in the train of what I had seen. Those sort of ideas in his head and that sort of life with his wife. D'you remember my telling you years—oh, years ago—that he looked like a chap who'd lost something and was wondering where he'd put it? Well, the Sabre I left down there two months ago had not only lost it, but knew it was gone for good and all. That was Sabre—except when the pink got under his skin when he got talking.

"All right. All right. Now that's just the prologue. That's just what you're supposed to know before the Curtain goes up. Now, am I going on to the drama or are we going to bed.... The drama? Right. You're a lewd fellow of the baser sort, but you occasionally have wise instincts. Right. The drama."



CHAPTER II

I

Continued Hapgood:

"All right. That was two months ago. Last week I was down at Tidborough again. Felt I'd got rather friendly with old Sabre on my last visit so as soon as I could toddled off to the office to look him up. Felt quite sure he'd be back there again by now. But he wasn't. He wasn't, and when I began inquiring for him found there seemed to be some rummy mystery about his absence. Like this. Some sort of a clerk was in the shop as I went in. 'Mr. Sabre upstairs, eh?' I asked. 'No. No, Mr. Sabre's not—not here,' says my gentleman, with rather an odd look at me.

"'What, not still laid up, is he?'

"The chap gave me a decidedly odd look. 'Mr. Sabre's not attending the office at present, sir.'

"'Not attending the office? Not ill, is he?'

"'No, not ill, I think, sir. Not attending the office. Perhaps you'd like to see one of the partners?'

"I looked at him. He looked at me. What the devil did he mean? Just then I caught sight of an old bird I knew slightly coming down the stairs with a book under his arm. Old chap called Bright. Sort of foreman or something. Looked rather like Moses coming down the mountain with the Tables of Stone in his fist. I said in my cheery way, 'Hullo, Mr. Bright. Good morning. I was just inquiring for Mr. Sabre.'

"By Jove, I thought for a minute the old patriarch was going to heave the tables of stone at my head. He caught up the book in both his hands and gave a sort of choke and blazed at me out of his eyes—by gad, I might have been poor old Aaron caught jazzing round the golden calf.

"'Let me tell you, sir, this is no place to inquire after Mr. Sabre,' said he. 'Let me tell you—'

"Well, I'd ha' let him tell me any old thing. That was what I was there for. But he shut himself up with a kind of gasp and cannoned himself into his tabernacle under the stairs and left me there, wondering if I was where I thought I was, or had got into a moving-picture show by mistake. The clerk had fallen through the floor or something. I was alone. Friendless. Nobody wanted me. I thought to myself, 'Percival, old man, you're on the unpopular side of the argument. You're nonsuited, old man.' And I thought I wouldn't take any more chances in this Biblical film, not with old father Abraham Fortune or Friend Judas Iscariot Twyning; I thought I'd push out to Penny Green and see old Sabre for myself.

"So I did. I certainly did....

"You can imagine me, old man, in my natty little blue suit, tripping up the path of Sabre's house and guessing to myself that the mystery wasn't a mystery at all, but only the office perhaps rather fed up with Sabre for staying away nursing his game leg so long. By Jove, it wasn't that. House had rather a neglected appearance, I thought. Door knob not polished, or blinds still down somewhere or something. I don't know. Something. And what made me conscious of it was that I was kept a long time waiting after I'd rung the bell. In fact, I had to ring twice. Then I heard some one coming, and you know how your mind unconsciously expects things and so gives you quite a start when the thing isn't there; well, I suppose I'd been expecting to see one of Sabre's two servants, 'my couple of Jinkses' as he calls them, and 'pon my soul I was quite startled when the door opened and it wasn't one of them at all, but a very different pair of shoes.

"It was a young woman; ladylike, dressed just in some ordinary sort of clothes; I don't know; uncommonly pretty, or might have been if she hadn't looked so uncommonly sad; and—this was what knocked me carrying a baby. 'Pon my soul, I couldn't have been more astonished if the door had been opened by the Kaiser carrying the Crown Prince.

"I don't know why I should have imagined she was the kid's mother, but I did. I don't know why I should have looked at her hands, but I did. I don't know why I should have expected to see a wedding ring, but I did. And there wasn't one.

"Well, she was saying 'Yes?' in an inquiring, timid sort of way, me standing there like a fool, you understand, and I suddenly recovered from my flabbergasteration and guessed the obvious thing—that the Sabres had let their house to strangers and gone away. Still more obvious, you might say, that Mrs. Sabre had produced a baby, and that the girl was her sister or some one, but that never occurred to me. No, I guessed they'd gone away, and I said, 'I was calling to see Mr. Sabre. Has he gone away?'

"I'd thought her looking timid. She was looking at me now decidedly as if she were frightened of me. 'No, no, Mr. Sabre's not gone away. He's here. Are you a friend of his?'

"I smiled at her. 'Well, I used to be,' I said. She didn't smile. What the dickens was up? 'I used to be. I always thought I was. My name's Hapgood.'

"'Perhaps you'd better come in.'

"You know, it was perfectly extraordinary. Her voice was as sad as her face. I stepped in. What on earth was I going to hear? Sabre dying? Wife dying? Air-raid bomb fallen on the house and everybody dead? 'Pon my soul, I began to feel creepy. Scalp began to prick. Then suddenly there was old Sabre at the head of the stairs. 'What is it, Effie?' Then he saw me. 'Hullo, Hapgood!' His voice was devilish pleased. Then he said again, rather in a thoughtful voice, 'Hullo, Hapgood,' and he began to come down, slowly, with his stick.

"Well, he wasn't dead, anyway; that was something to go on with. I took his hand and said, 'Hullo, Sabre. How goes it, old man? Able to do the stairs now, I see. I was down to Tidborough and thought I'd come and look you up again.'

"'Fine,' he said, shaking my hand. 'Jolly nice of you.' Then he said, 'Did you go to the office for me, Hapgood?'

"'Just looked in,' I said offhandedly. 'Saw a clerk who said you weren't down to-day, so I came along up.'

"He was doing some thinking, I could see that. He said, 'Jolly good of you. I am glad. You'll stay a bit, of course.' The girl had faded away. He went a bit along the passage and called out, 'Effie, you can scratch up a bit of lunch for Mr. Hapgood?'

"I suppose she said Yes. 'Lunch'll be on in about two minutes,' he came back to me with. 'You're later than when you came up last time. Come along in here.'

"Led me into the morning room and we sat down and pretended to talk. Very poor pretence, I give you my word. Both of us manifestly straining to do the brisk and hearty, and the two of us producing about as much semblance of chatty interchange as a couple of victims waiting their turn in a dentist's parlour. The door was open and I could hear some one moving about laying the lunch. That was all I could hear (bar Sabre's spasmodic jerks of speech) and I don't mind telling you I was a deal more interested in what I could hear going on outside than in anything we could put up between us. Or rather in what I couldn't hear going on outside. No voices, none of those sounds, none of that sort of feeling that tells you people are about the place. No, there was some mystery knocking about the place somewhere, and it was on the other side of the door, and that was where my attention was.

"Presently I heard the girl's voice outside, 'Lunch is ready.'

"We jumped up like two schoolboys released from detention and went along in. More mystery. Lunch at Sabre's place was always a beautifully conducted rite, as I was accustomed to it. Announced by two gongs, warning and ready, to begin with, and here we'd been shuffled in by a girl's casual remark in the passage; and beautifully appointed and served when you got there and here was—Well, there were places laid for two only and a ramshackle kind of cold picnic scattered about the cloth. Everything there, help yourself kind of show. Bit of cold meat, half a cold tart, lump of cheese, loaf of bread, assortment of plates, and so on.

"Sabre said, 'Oh, by the way, my wife's not here. She's away.'

"I murmured the polite thing. He was staring at the two places, frowning a bit. 'Half a minute,' he said and hopped off on his old stick. Then I heard him talking to this mysterious girl. At least I heard her voice first. 'Oh, I can't! I can't!'

"Then Sabre: 'Nonsense, Effie. You must. You must. I insist. Don't be silly.'

"Then a door slammed.

"Well, I ask you! If I didn't say to myself, 'The plot thickens,' if I didn't say it, I can promise you I thought it. I did. And it proceeded to curdle. The door that had slammed opened and presently in comes Sabre with the girl. And the girl with the baby in her arms. Sabre said in his ordinary, easy voice—he's got a particularly nice voice, has old Sabre—'This is a very retiring young person, Hapgood. Had to be dragged in. Miss Bright. Her father's in the office. Perhaps you've met him, have you?'

"Well, I don't know what I said, old man. I know what I thought. I thought just precisely what you're thinking. Yes, I had a furiously vivid shot of a recollection of old Bright as I'd seen him a couple of hours before, of his blazing look, of his gesture of wanting to hurl the Tables of Stone at me, and of his extraordinary remark about Sabre,—I had that and I did what you're doing: I put two and two together and found the obvious answer (same as you) and I jolly near fell down dead, I did. Jolly near.

"But Sabre was going on, pleasant and natural as you please. 'Miss Bright was here as companion to my wife while I was in France. Now she's staying here a bit. Put the baby on the sofa, Effie, and let's get to work. I'd like you two to be friends. Hapgood and I were at school together, you know, about a thousand years ago. They used to call him Porker because he was so thin.'

"The girl smiled faintly, I put up an hysterical sort of squeak, and we sat down. The meal wasn't precisely a banquet. We helped ourselves and stacked up the soiled plates as we used them. No servants, d'you see? That was pretty clear by now. No wife, no servants, no wedding ring; nothing but old Bright's daughter and old Bright's daughter's baby—and—and—Sabre.

"I suppose I talked. I heard my voice sometimes. The easy flow Sabre had started with didn't last long. The girl hardly spoke. I watched her a lot. I liked the look of her. She must have been uncommonly pretty in a vivacious sort of way before she ran up against her trouble, whatever it was. I say Whatever it was. I'd no real reason to suppose I knew; though mind you, I was guessing pretty shrewdly it was lying there on the sofa wrapped up in what d'you call 'ems—swaddling clothes. Yes, uncommonly pretty, but now sad—sad as a young widow at the funeral, that sort of look. It was her eyes that especially showed it. Extraordinary eyes. Like two great pools in a shadow. If I may quote poetry, at you,

Her eyes were deeper than the depth Of waters stilled at even.

And all the sorrow in them of all the women since Mary Magdalen. All the time but once. Once the baby whimpered, and she got up and went to it and stooped over it the other side of the sofa from me, so I could see her face. By gad, if you could have seen her eyes then! Motherhood! Lucky you weren't there, because if you've any idea of ever painting a picture called Motherhood, you'd ha' gone straight out and cut your throat on the mat in despair. You certainly would.

"Well, anyway, the banquet got more and more awkward to endure as it dragged on, and mighty glad I was when at last the girl got up—without a word—and picked up the baby and left us. Left us. We were no more chatty for being alone, I can promise you. I absolutely could not think of a word to say, and any infernal thing that old Sabre managed to rake up seemed complete and done to death the minute he'd said it.

"Then all of a sudden he began. He fished out some cigarettes and chucked me one and we smoked like a couple of exhaust valves for about two minutes and then he said, 'Hapgood, why on earth should I have to explain all this to you? Why should I?'

"I said, a tiny bit sharply—I was getting a bit on edge, you know—I said, 'Well, who's asked you to? I haven't asked any questions, have I?'

"Sabre said, 'No, I know you haven't asked any, and I'm infernally grateful to you. You're the first person across this threshold in months that hasn't. But I know you're thinking them—hard. And I know I've got to answer them. And I want to. I want to most frightfully. But what beats me is this infernal feeling that I must explain to you, to you and to everybody, whether I want to or not. Why should I? It's my own house. I can do what I like in it. I'm not, anyway, doing anything wrong. I'm doing something more right than I've ever done in my life, and yet everybody's got the right to question me and everybody's got the right to be answered and—Hapgood, it's the most bewildering state of affairs that can possibly be imagined. I'm up against a code of social conventions, and by Jove I'm absolutely down and out. I'm absolutely tied up hand and foot and chucked away. Do you know what I am, Hapgood—?'

"He gave a laugh. He wasn't talking a bit savagely, and he never did talk like that all through what he told me. He was just talking in a tone of sheer, hopeless, extremely interested puzzlement—bafflement—amazement; just as a man might talk to you of some absolutely baffling conjuring trick he'd seen. In fact, he used that very expression. 'Do you know what I am, Hapgood?' and he gave a laugh, as I've said. 'I'm what they call a social outcast. A social outcast. Beyond the pale. Unspeakable. Ostracized. Blackballed. Excommunicated.' He got up and began to stump about the room, hands in his pockets, chin on his collar, wrestling with it,—and wrestling, mind you, just in profoundly interested bafflement.

"'Unspeakable,' he said. 'Excommunicated. By Jove, it's astounding. It's amazing. It's like a stupendous conjuring trick. I've done something that isn't done—not something that's wrong, something that's incontestably right. But it isn't done. People don't do it, and I've done it and therefore hey, presto, I'm turned into a leper, a pariah, an outlaw. Amazing, astounding!'

"Then he settled down and told me. And this is what he told me."

II

"When he was out in France this girl I'd seen—this Effie, as he called her, Effie Bright—had come to live as companion to his wife. It appears he more or less got her the job. He'd seen her at the office with her father and he'd taken a tremendous fancy to her. 'A jolly kid,' that was the expression he used, and he said he was awfully fond of her just as he might be of a jolly little sister. He got her some other job previously with some friends or other, and then the old lady there died and the girl came to his place while he was away. Something like that. Anyway, she came. She came somewhere about October, '15, and she left early in March following, just over a year ago. His wife got fed up with her and got rid of her—that's what Sabre says—got fed up with her and got rid of her. And Sabre was at home at the time. Mark that, old man, because it's important. Sabre was at home at the time—about three weeks—on leave.

"Very well. The girl got the sack and he went back to France. She got another job somewhere as companion again. He doesn't quite know where. He thinks at Bournemouth. Anyway, that's nothing to do with it. Well, he got wounded and discharged from the Army, as you know, and in February he was living at home again with his wife in the conditions I described to you when I began. He said nothing to me about the conditions—about the terms they were on; but I've told you what I saw. It's important because it was exactly into the situation as I then saw it that came to pass the thing that came to pass. This:

"The very week after I'd been down there, his wife, reading a letter at breakfast one morning, gave a kind of a snort (as I can imagine it) and chucked the letter over to him and said, 'Ha! There's your wonderful Miss Bright for you! What did I tell you? What do you think of that? Ha!'

"Those were her very words and her very snorts and what they meant—what 'Your wonderful Miss Bright for you' meant—was, as he explained to me, that when he was home on leave, with the girl in the house, they were frequently having words about her, because he thought his wife was a bit sharp with her, and his wife, for her part, said he was forever sticking up for her.

"'What do you think of that? Ha!' and she chucked the letter over to him, and from what I know of her you can imagine her sitting bolt upright, bridling with virtuous prescience confirmed, watching him, while he read it.

"While he read it.... Sabre said the letter was the most frightfully pathetic document he could ever have imagined. Smudged, he said, and stained and badly expressed as if the writer—this girl—this Effie Bright—was crying and incoherent with distress when she wrote it. And she no doubt was. She said she'd got into terrible trouble. She'd got a little baby. Sabre said it was awful to him the way she kept on in every sentence calling it 'a little baby'—never a child, or just a baby, but always 'a little baby,' 'my little baby.' He said it was awful. She said it was born in December—you remember, old man, it was the previous March she'd got the sack from them—and that she'd been living in lodgings with it, and that now she was well enough to move, and had come to the absolute end of her money, she was being turned out and was at her wits' end with despair and nearly out of her mind to know what to do and all that kind of thing. She said her father wouldn't have anything to do with her, and no one would have anything to do with her—so long as she kept her little baby. That was her plight: no one would have anything to do with her while she had the baby. Her father was willing to take her home, and some kind people had offered to take her into service, and the clergyman where she was had said there were other places he could get her, but only, all of them, if she would give up the baby and put it out to nurse somewhere: and she said, and underlined it about fourteen times, Sabre said, and cried over it so you could hardly read it, she said: 'And, oh, Mrs. Sabre, I can't, I can't, I simply can not give up my little baby.... He's mine,' she said. 'He looks at me, and knows me, and stretches out his tiny little hands to me, and I can't give him up. I can't let my little baby go. Whatever I've done, I'm his mother and he's my little baby and I can't let him go.'

"Sabre said it was awful. I can believe it was. I'd seen the girl, and I'd seen her stooping over her baby (like I told you) and I can well believe awful was the word for it. Poor soul.

"And then she said—I can remember this bit—then she said, 'And so, in my terrible distress, dear Mrs. Sabre, I am throwing myself on your mercy, and begging you, imploring you, for the love of God to take in me and my little baby and let me work for you and do anything for you and bless you and ask God's blessing for ever upon you and teach my little baby to pray for you as—' something or other, I forget. And then she said a lot of hysterical things about working her fingers to the bone for Mrs. Sabre, and knowing she was a wicked girl and not fit to be spoken to by any one, and was willing, to sleep in a shed in the garden and never to open her mouth, and all that sort of thing; and all the way through 'my little baby,' 'my little baby.' Sabre said it was awful. Also she said,—I'm telling you just what Sabre told me, and he told me this bit deliberately, as you might say—also she said that she didn't want to pretend she was more sinned against than sinning, but that if Mrs. Sabre knew the truth she might judge her less harshly and be more willing to help her. Yes, Sabre told me that....

"All right. Well, there was the appeal, 'there was this piteous appeal', as Sabre said, and there was Sabre profoundly touched by it, and there was his wife bridling over it—one up against her husband who'd always stuck up for the girl, d'you see, and about two million up in justification of her own opinion of her. There they were; and then Sabre said, turning the letter over in his hands, 'Well, what are you going to do about it?'

"You can imagine his wife's tone. 'Do about it! Do about it! What on earth do you think I'm going to do about it?'

"And Sabre said, 'Well, I think we ought certainly to take the poor creature in.'

"That's what he said; and I can perfectly imagine his face as he said it—all twisted up with the intensity of the struggle he foresaw and with the intensity of his feelings on the subject; and I can perfectly well imagine his wife's face as she heard him, by Jove, I can. She was furious. Absolutely white and speechless with fury; but not speechless long, Sabre said, and I dare bet she wasn't. Sabre said she worked herself up in the most awful way and used language about the girl that cut him like a knife—language like speaking of the baby as 'that brat.' It made him wince. It would—the sort of chap he is. And he said that the more she railed, the more frightfully he realised the girl's position, up against that sort of thing everywhere she turned.

"He described all that to me and then, so to speak, he stated his case. He said to me, his face all twisted up with the strain of trying to make some one else see what was so perfectly clear to himself, he said, 'Well, what I say to you, Hapgood, is just precisely what I said to my wife. I felt that the girl had a claim on us. In the first place, she'd turned to us in her abject misery for help and that alone established a claim, even if it had come from an utter stranger. It established a claim because here was a human creature absolutely down and out come to us, picking us out from everybody, for succour. Damn it, you've got to respond. You're picked out. You! One human creature by another human creature. Breathing the same air. Sharing the same mortality. Responsible to the same God. You've got to! You can't help yourself. You're caught. If you hear some one appealing to any one else you can scuttle out of it. Get away. Pass by on the other side. Square it with your conscience any old how. But when that some one comes to you, you're done, you're fixed. You may hate it. You may loathe and detest the position that's been forced on you. But it's there. You can't get out of it. The same earth as your earth is there at your feet imploring you; and if you've got a grain, a jot of humanity, you must, you must, out of the very flesh and bones of you, respond to that cry of this your brother or your sister made as you yourself are made.

"'Well, Hapgood,' he went on, 'that's one claim the girl had on us, and to my way of thinking it was enough. But she had another, a personal claim. She'd been in our house, in our service; she was our friend; sat with us; eaten with us; talked with us; shared with us; and now, now, turned to us. Good God, man, was that to be refused? Was that to be denied? Were we going to repudiate that? Were we going to say, "Yes, it's true you were here. You were all very well when you were of use to us; that's all true and admitted; but now you're in trouble and you're no use to us; you're in trouble and no use, and you can get to hell out of it." Good God, were we to say that?'

"You should have seen his face; you should have heard his voice; you should have seen him squirming and twisting in his chair as though this was the very roots of him coming up out of him and hurting him. And I tell you, old man, it was the very roots of him. It was his creed, it was his religion, it was his composition; it was the whole nature and basis and foundation of the man as it had been storing up within him all his life, ever since he was the rummy, thoughtful sort of beggar he used to be as a kid at old Wickamote's thirty years ago. It got me, I can tell you. It made me feel funny. Yes, and the next thing he went on to was equally the blood and bones of him. In a way even more characteristic. He said, 'Mind you, Hapgood, I don't blame my wife that all this had no effect on her. I don't blame her in the least, and I never lost my temper or got angry over the business. I see her point of view absolutely. And I see absolutely the point of view of the girl's father and of every one else who's willing to take in the girl but insists she must give up the baby. I see their point of view and understand it as plain as I see and understand that calendar hanging on the wall. I see it perfectly,' and he laughed in a whimsical sort of way and said, 'That's the devil of it.'

"Characteristic, eh? Wasn't that just exactly old Sabre at school puzzling up his old nut and saying, 'Yes, but I see what he means'?

"Well, wait a bit. He came to that again afterwards. It seems that, if you please, the very next day the girl herself follows up her letter by walking into the house. Eh? Yes, you can well say 'By Jove.' In she walked, baby and all. She'd walked all the way from Tidborough, and God knows how far earlier in the day. Sabre said she was half dead. She'd been to her father's house, and her father, that terrific-looking old Moses coming down the mountain that I've described to you, had turned her out. He'd take her—he had cried over her, the poor crying creature said—if she'd send away her baby, also if she'd say who the father was, but she wouldn't. 'I can't let my little baby go,' she said. Sabre said it was awful, hearing her. And so he drove her out, the old Moses man did, and the poor soul tried around for a bit—no money—and then trailed out to them.

"Sabre wouldn't tell me all that happened between his wife and himself. I gather that, in his quiet way, perfectly seeing his wife's point of view and genuinely deeply distressed at the frightful pitch things were coming to, in that sort of way he nevertheless got his back up against his sense of what he ought to do and said the girl was not to be sent away, that she was to stop.

"His wife said, 'You're determined?'

"He said, 'Mabel' (that's her name) 'Mabel, I'm desperately, poignantly sorry, but I'm absolutely determined.'

"She said, 'Very well. If she's going to be in the house, I'm going out of it. I'm going to my father's. Now. You'll not expect the servants to stay in the house while you've got this—this woman living with you—' (Yes, she said that.) 'So I shall pay them up and send them off, now, before I go. Are you still determined?'

"The poor devil, standing there with his stick and his game leg, and his face working, said, 'Mabel, Mabel, believe me, it kills me to say it, but I am, absolutely. The girl's got no home. She only wants to keep her baby. She must stop.'

"His wife went off to the kitchen.

"Pretty fierce, eh?

"Sabre said he sat where she'd left him, in the morning room in a straight-backed chair, with his legs stuck out in front of him, wrestling with it—like hell. The girl was in the dining room. His wife and the servants were plunging about overhead.

"In about two hours his wife came back dressed to go. She said, 'I've packed my boxes. I shall send for them. The maids have packed theirs and they will send. I've sent them on to the station in front of me. There's only one more thing I want to say to you. You say this woman—' ('This woman, you know!' old Sabre said when he was telling me.) 'You say this woman has a claim on us?'

"He began, 'Mabel, I do. I—'

"She said, 'Do you want my answer to that? My answer is that perhaps she has a claim on you!'

"And she went."

III

"Well, there you are, old man. There it is. That's the story. That's the end. That's the end of my story, but what the end of the story as Sabre's living it is going to be, takes—well, it lets in some pretty wide guessing. There he is, and there's the girl, and there's the baby; and he's what he says he is—what I told you: a social outcast, beyond the pale, ostracized, excommunicated. No one will have anything to do with him. They've cleared him out of the office, or as good as done so. He says the man Twyning worked that. The man Twyning—that Judas Iscariot chap, you remember—is very thick with old Bright, the girl's father. Old Bright pretty naturally thinks his daughter has gone back to the man who is responsible for her ruin, and this Twyning person—who's a partner, by the way—wrote to Sabre and told him that, although he personally didn't believe it—'not for a moment, old man,' he wrote—still Sabre would appreciate the horrible scandal that had arisen, and would appreciate the fact that such a scandal could not be permitted in a firm like theirs with its high and holy Church connections. And so on. He said that he and Fortune had given the position their most earnest and sympathetic thought and prayers—and prayers, mark you—and that they'd come to the conclusion that the best thing to be done was for Sabre to resign.

"Sabre says he was knocked pretty well silly by this step. He says it was his first realisation of the attitude that everybody was going to take up against him. He went off down and saw them, and you can imagine there was a bit of a scene. He said he was dashed if he'd resign. Why on earth should he resign? Was he to resign because he was doing in common humanity what no one else had the common humanity to do? That sort of thing. You can imagine it didn't cut much ice with that crowd. The upshot of it was that Twyning, speaking for the firm, and calling him about a thousand old mans and that sort of slush, told him that the position would be reconsidered when he ceased to have the girl in his house and that, in the interests of the firm, until he did that he must cease to attend the office.

"And then old Sabre said he began to find himself in exactly the same position with every one. Every door closed to him. No one having anything to do with him. Even an old chap next door, a particular friend of his called Fungus or Fargus or some such name—even this old bird's house and his society is forbidden him. Sabre says old Fungus, or whatever his name is, is all right, but it appears he's ruled by about two dozen ramping great daughters, and they won't let their father have anything to do with Sabre. No, he's shut right out, everywhere.

"And Sabre, mind you—this is Sabre's extraordinary point of view: he's not a bit furious with all these people. He's feeling his position most frightfully; it's eating the very heart out of him, but he's working up not the least trace of bitterness over it. He says they're all supporting an absolutely right and just convention, and that it's not their fault if the convention is so hideously cruel in its application. He says the absolute justice and the frightful cruelty of conventions has always interested him, and that he remembers once putting up to a great friend of his as an example this very instance of society's attitude towards an unmarried girl who gets into trouble,—never dreaming that one day he was going to find himself up against the full force of it. He said, 'If this poor girl, if any girl, didn't find the world against her and every door closed to her, just look where you'd be, Hapgood. You'd have morality absolutely gone by the hoard. No, all these people are right, absolutely right—and all conventions are absolutely right—in their principle; it's their practice that's sometimes so terrible. And when it is, how can you turn round and rage? I can't.'

"Well, I said to him what I say to you, old man. I said, 'Yes, that's all right, Sabre. That's true, though there're precious few would take it as moderately as you; but look here, where's this going to end? Where's it going to land you? It's landed you pretty fiercely as it is. Have you thought what it may develop into? What are you doing about it?'

"He said he was writing round, writing to advertisers and to societies and places, to find a place where the girl would be taken in to work and allowed to have her baby with her. He said there must be hundreds of kind-hearted people about the place who would do it; it was only a question of finding them. Well, as to that, kind hearts are more than coronets and all that kind of thing, but it strikes me they're a jolly side harder than coronets to find when it comes to a question of an unmarried mother and her baby, and when the kind hearts, being found, come to make inquiries and find that the person making application on the girl's behalf is the man she's apparently living with, and the man with Sabre's extraordinary record in regard to the girl. I didn't say that to poor old Sabre. I hadn't the face to. But I say it to you. You're no doubt thinking it for yourself. All that chain of circumstances, eh? Went out of his way to get her her first job. Got her into his house. In a way responsible for her getting the sack. Child born just about when it must have been born after she'd been sacked. Girl coming to him for help. Writing to his wife, 'If only you knew the truth.' Wife leaving him. Eh? It's pretty fierce, isn't it? And I don't believe he's got an idea of it. I don't believe he realises for a moment what an extraordinary coil it all is. God help him if he ever does.... He'll want it.

"No, I didn't say a word like that to him. I couldn't. The nearest I got to it was I said, 'Well, but time's getting on, you know, old man. It's a—a funny position on the face of it. What do you suppose your wife's thinking all this time?'

"He said his wife would be absolutely all right once he'd found a home for the girl and sent her away. He said his wife was always a bit sharp in her views of things, but that she'd be all right when it was all over.

"I said, 'H'm. Heard from her?'

"He had—once. He showed me the letter. Well, you know, old man, every fox knows what foxes smell like; and I smelt a dear brother solicitor's smell in that letter. Smelt it strong. Asking him to make a home possible for her to return to so they might resume their life together. I recognised it. I've dictated dozens.

"I handed it back. I said, 'H'm' again. I said, 'H'm, you remember, old man, there was that remark of hers just as she was leaving you—that remark that perhaps the girl might have a claim on you. Remember that, don't you?'

"By Jove, I thought for a minute he was going to flare up and let me have it. But he laughed instead. Laughed as if I was a fool and said, 'Oh, good Lord, man, that's utterly ridiculous. That was only just my wife's way. My wife's got plenty of faults to find with me—but that kind of thing! Man alive, with all my faults, my wife knows me.'

"Perhaps—I say, my holy aunt, it's nearly two o'clock! Come on, I'm for bed. Perhaps his wife does know him. What I'm thinking is, does he know his wife? I'm a solicitor. I know what I'd say if she came to me."



CHAPTER III

I

On a day a month later—in May—Hapgood said:

"Now, I'll tell you. Old Sabre—by Jove, it's frightful. He's crashed. The roof's fallen in on him. He's nearly out of his mind. I don't like it. I don't like it a bit. I've only just left him. Here, in London. A couple of hours ago. I oughtn't to have left him. The chap's not fit to be left. But I had to. He cleared me off. I had to go. He wasn't in a state to be argued with. I was frightened of irritating him. To tell you the truth, I'm frightened now about him. Dead frightened.

"Look here, it's in two parts, this sudden development. Two parts as I saw it. Begins all right and then works up. Two parts—morning and afternoon yesterday and a bit to-day. And of all extraordinary places to happen at—Brighton.

"Yes, Brighton. I was down there for a Saturday to Monday with my Missus. This absolutely topping weather, you know. We were coming back Monday evening. Yesterday. Very well. Monday morning we were sunning on the pier, she and I. I was reading the paper, she was watching the people and making remarks about them. If Paradise is doing in the next world what you best liked doing in this, my wife will ask Peter if she can sit at the gate and watch the demobilised souls arriving and pass remarks about them. She certainly will.

"Well, all of a sudden she began, 'Oh, what a frightfully interesting face that man's got!' That's the way she talks. 'What a most interesting face. Do look, Percy.'

"I said, 'Well, so have I got an interesting face. Look at mine.'

"'Oh, but do, Percy. You must. On that seat by himself just opposite. He's just staring at nothing and thinking and thinking. And his face looks so worn and tired and yet so very kind and such a wistful look as though he was thinking of—'

"I growled, still reading: 'He's probably thinking what he's going to have for lunch. Oh, dash it, do stop jogging me. Where is he?'

"And then I looked across. Old Sabre! By Jove, you might have pushed me over with one finger. Old Sabre in a tweed suit and a soft hat, and his game leg stuck out straight, and his old stick, and his hands about a thousand miles deep in his pockets, and looking—yes, my wife said the true thing when she said how he was looking. Any one would have taken a second squint at old Sabre's face as I saw it then—taken a second squint and wondered what he'd been through and what on earth his mind could be on now. They certainly would.

"I knew. I knew; but I tell you this, I could see he'd been through a tough lot more, and thought a considerable number of fathoms deeper, in the month since I'd seen him last. Yes, by Jove, I could see that without spectacles.

"I went over to him. You could have pushed him off the seat with one finger when he saw me. Except that you wouldn't have had any fingers worth using as fingers, after he'd squeezed your hands as he squeezed mine. Both of them. And his face like a shout on a sunny morning. Yes, he was pleased. I like to think how jolly pleased the old chap was.

"I took him over to my wife, and my wife climbed all over him, and we chatted round for a bit, and then I worked off my wife on a bunch of people we knew and I got old Sabre on to a secluded bench and started in on him. What on earth was he doing down at Brighton, and how were things?

"He said 'Things...? Things are happening with me, Hapgood. Not to me—with me. Happening pretty fierce and pretty quick. I'm right in the middle of the most extraordinary, the most astounding, the most amazing things. I had to get away from them for a bit. I simply had to. I came down here for a week-end to get away from them and go on wrestling them out when they weren't right under my eyes. I'm going back to-morrow. Effie was all right—with her baby. She was glad I should go—glad for me, I mean. Poor kid, poor kid. Top of her own misery, Hapgood, she's miserable to death at what she says she's let me in for. She's always crying about it. Crying. She's torn between knowing my house is the only place where she can have her baby, between that and seeing what her coming into the place has caused. She spends her time trying to do any little thing she can to make me comfortable, hunts about for any little thing she can do for me. It's pathetic, you know. At least, it's pathetic to me. Jumped at this sudden idea of mine of getting away for a couple of days. Said it would please her more than anything in the world to know I was right away from it all for a bit. Fussed over me packing up and all that, you know. Pathetic. Frightfully. Look, just to show you how she hunts about for anything to do for me—said my old straw hat was much too shabby for Brighton and would I get her some stuff, oxalic acid, and let her clean it up for me. That sort of little trifle. As a matter of fact she made such a shocking mess of the hat that I hardly liked to wear it. Couldn't hurt her feelings, though. Chucked it into the sea when I got here and bought this one. Make a funny story for her when I get back about how it blew off. That's the sort of life we lead together, Hapgood. She always trying to do little things for me and I trying to think out little jokes for her to try and cheer her up. Give you another example. Just when I had brought her the stuff for my hat. Met me with, Had I lost anything? Made a mystery of it. Said I was to guess. Guessed at last that it must be my cigarette case. It was. She'd found it lying about and took me to show where she'd put it for safety—in the back of the clock in my room. Said I was always to look there for any little valuables I might miss, and wanted me to know how she liked to be careful of my things like that. Fussing over me, d'you see? Trying to make it seem we were living normal, ordinary lives.

"'That's the sort of life we lead together, Hapgood—together; but the life I'm caught up in, the things that are happening with me, that I'm right in the middle of, that I felt I had to get away from for a bit—astounding, Hapgood, astounding, amazing....'

"I'm trying to give you exactly his own words, old man. I want you to get this business just exactly as I got it. Old Sabre turned to me with that—with that 'astounding, amazing'—turned and faced me and said:

"'Hapgood, I'm finding out the most extraordinary things about this life as we've made it and as we live it. Hapgood, if I kept forty women in different parts of London and made no secret of it, nothing would be said. People would know I was rather a shameless lot, my little ways would be an open secret, but nothing would be said. I should be received everywhere. But I'm thought to have brought one woman into my house and I'm banned. I'm unspeakable. Forty, flagrantly, outside, and I'm still a received member of society. People are sorry for my wife, or pretend to be, but I'm still all right, a bit of a rake, you know, but a decent enough chap. But I take pity on one poor girl because she clings to her motherhood although she's unmarried, and I'm beyond the pale. I'm unspeakable. Amazing. Do you say it's not absolutely astounding?

"'Hapgood, look here. It's this. This is what I've found. You can do the shocking things, and it can be known you do the shocking things. But you mustn't be seen doing them. You can beat your wife, and it can be known among your friends that you beat your wife. But you mustn't be seen beating her. You mustn't beat her in the street or in your neighbour's garden. You can drink, and it can be known you drink; but you mustn't be seen drunk.

"'Do you see, Hapgood? Do you see? The conventions are all right, moral, sound, excellent, admirable, but to save their own face there's a blind side to them, a shut-eye side. Keep that side of them and you're all right. They'll let you alone. They'll pretend they don't see you. But come out and stand in front of them and they'll devour you. They'll smash and grind and devour you, Hapgood. They're devouring me.

"'That's where they've got me in their jaws, Hapgood; and where they've got Effie in their jaws is just precisely again on a blind, shut-eye side.... They're rightly based, they're absolutely just, you can't gainsay them, but to save their face, again, they're indomitably blind and deaf to the hideous cruelties in their application. They mean well. They cause the most frightful suffering, the most frightful tragedies, but they won't look at them, they won't think of them, they won't speak of them: they mean well....

"Old Sabre put his head in his hands. He might have been praying. He looked to me sort of physically wrestling with what he called the jaws that had got him and had got her. He looked up at me and he said, 'Hapgood, this is where I've got to. This is where I am. Hapgood, life's all wrong, stupid, cruel, blundering, but it means well. We've shaped it to fit us as we think we ought to live and it means well. Means well! My God, Hapgood, the most terrible, the most lamentable self-confession that ears can hear—"I meant well." Some frightful blunder committed, some irreparable harm inflicted, and that piteous, heart-broken, heart-breaking, maddening, infuriating excuse, "I meant well. I meant well. Why didn't some one tell me?" Life means well, Hapgood. It does mean well. It only wants some one to tell it where it's going wrong, where it's blundering, where it's just missing, and why it's just missing, all it means to do.'

"With that he went back to all that stuff I told you he told me when I was down with him last month—that stuff about the need for a new revelation suited to men's minds to-day, the need for new light. I can't tell you all that—it's not in my line, that sort of talk. But he said, his face all pink under his skin, he said, 'Hapgood, I'll tell you a thing. I've got the secret. I've got the key to the riddle that's been puzzling me all my life. I've got the new revelation in terms good enough for me to understand. Light, more light. Here it is: God is—love. Not this, that, nor the other that the intelligence revolts at, and puts aside, and goes away, and goes on hungering, hungering and unsatisfied; nothing like that; but just this: plain for a child, clear as daylight for grown intelligence: God is—love. Listen to this, Hapgood: "He that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God and God in him; for God is love." Ecstasy, Hapgood, ecstasy! It explains everything to me. I can reduce all the mysteries to terms of that. One of these days, perhaps one of these days, I'll be able to write it and tell people.'

"I tell you, old man, you can think what you like about it, but old Sabre, when he was telling me that, was a pretty first-class advertisement for his own revelation. He'd found it all right. The look on him was nearer the divine than anything I've ever come near seeing. It certainly was.

"So you see that was the morning part of this that I'm telling you, what I called the first part, and it was not too bad. He'd been through, he was going through some pretty fierce things, but he was holding up under them. Oh, some pretty fierce things. I haven't told you half. One thing that hit him hard as he could bear was that that old pal of his, Fungus or Fargus, Fargus as a matter of fact, that old chap fell dying and did die—knocked out by pneumonia special constabling—and those dashed ramping great daughters of his wouldn't let poor old Sabre into the house to see him. Fact. He said it hurt him worse, made him realise worse what a ban he was up against, than anything that's happened to him. It would. That chap dying and him too shocking to be admitted.

"They did grant him one squint of his old friend, about five minutes, and stood over him like dragons all the time, five of them. Came to him one morning and said, as though they were speaking to a leper through bars, said, sort of holding their noses, 'We have to ask you to come to see Papa. The doctor thinks there is something Papa wishes to say to you.'