And looking back on that wreck of a room, I reflected how congenial Jaffery must have found his surroundings on board the Vesta. The weather had changed from summer calm to storm. The gentleman from the meteorological office who writes for the newspapers talked about cyclonic disturbances, and reported gales in the channel and on the west coasts of France. The same was likely to continue. The wind blew hard enough in Berkshire, what must it have done in the Bay of Biscay? As a matter of fact, as we learned from a picture postcard from Jaffery and a short letter from Liosha posted at Bordeaux, and from their lips considerably later—for impossible as it may seem, they did not go to the bottom or die of scurvy or the cannibal's pole-axe—they had made their way from Havre in an ever-increasing tempest, during which they apparently had not slept or put on a dry rag. Heavy seas washed the deck, and kept out the galley fires, so that warm food had not been procurable. It seemed that every horror I had prophesied had come to pass. I should have pitied them, but for the blatant joyousness of their communications. "I was not seasick a minute, and I have never been so happy in my life," wrote Liosha. "Hilary should have been with us," wrote Jaffery. "It would have made a man of him. Liosha in splendid fettle. She goes about in men's clothes and oilskins and can turn her hand to anything when she isn't lashed to a stanchion." You can just imagine them having cast off all semblance of Christians and wallowing in wet and dirt. . . .

About this time, according to the sequence of events recorded in my all too scraggy diary, Doria came to us for a week-end, her first visit since Jaffery's outrageous conduct. She was glad to make friends with us once more, and to prove it showed the pleasanter side of her character. She professed not to have forgiven Jaffery; but she referred to the terrible episode in less vehement terms. It was obvious to us both that she missed him more than she would confess, even to herself. In her reconstituted existence he had stood for an essential element. Unconsciously she had counted on his devotion, his companionship, his constant service, his bulky protection from the winds of heaven. Now that she had driven him away, she found a girder wanting in her life's neat structure, which accordingly had begun to wobble uncomfortably. After all, she had provoked the man (this with some reluctance she admitted to Barbara), and he had only picked her up and shaken her. He had had no intention of dashing out her brains or even of giving her a beating. In her heart she repented. Otherwise why should she take so ill Jaffery's flight with Liosha, which she characterised as abominable, and Liosha's flight with Jaffery, which she characterised as monstrous?

"I can't talk to Barbara about it," she said to me on the Sunday morning, perching herself on the corner of my library table, a disrespectful trick which she had caught from my wife, while I sat back in my writing-chair. "Barbara seems to be bemused about the woman. One would think she was a kind of saint, incapable of stain."

"In one specific way," I replied, "I think she is."

"Oh, rubbish, Hilary!" she smiled, and swung her little foot. "You, a man of the world, how can you talk so? First she runs off with that dreadful fellow and a few hours afterwards runs off with Jaffery. What respectable woman—well, what honest woman, according to the term of the lower classes—would run away with two men within twenty-five hours?"

"She went off with Fendihook, honourably, thinking he was going to marry her. She has joined Jaffery honourably, too, because there's no question of marriage or anything else between them."

"Sancta simplicitas!" She shook her head from side to side and looked at me pityingly. "I'll allow Jaffery is just a fool. But she isn't. The best one can say for her is that she has no moral sense. I know the type."

"Where have you studied it, my dear?" I asked.

She coloured, taken aback, but after half a second she replied with her ready sureness:

"In my father's drawing-room among city people and in my own among literary people."

"H'm!" said I. "Lioshas don't grow on every occasional chair."

"You're as bemused as Barbara."

"I haven't studied what you call the type," I replied. "But I've studied an individual, which you haven't."

She swung off the table. "Oh, well, have it your own way—Paul and Virginia, if you like. What does it matter to me?"

"Yes, my dear," said I. "That's just it—what the dickens does it matter to you?"

"Nothing at all." She snapped a dainty finger and thumb.

"You've turned Jaffery out of your house," I continued, with malicious intent. "You've sworn never to set eyes on him again. You've banished him beyond your horizon. His doings now can be no concern of yours. If he chose to elope with the fat woman in a freak museum, why shouldn't he? What would it have to do with you?"

"Only this," said Doria, coming back to the table corner but not sitting on it. "It would make Jaffery's declaration to me all the more insulting."

"'Having known me to decline'?" I quoted.

"Precisely."

She tossed her head, in her wounded pride. But unknowingly she had swallowed my bait. I had hooked my little fish. I smiled to myself. She was eaten up with jealousy.

"Well," said I, "you remember the French proverb about the absent being always in the wrong. Let us wait until they come back and hear what they've got to say for themselves."

She put her hands behind her back. As she stood, her little black and ivory head was not much above the level of mine. "What they may say is a matter of perfect indifference to me."

I bent forward. "I think I ought to tell you what Jaffery's—practically—last words to me were: 'There's only one woman in the world for me.' Meaning you." She broke away with a laugh. "And to prove it, he elopes with the fat woman! Oh, Hilary"—with the tips of her fingers she brushed my hair—"you really are a simple old dear!"

"All the same—" I began.

"All the same," she interrupted, "this is a very untidy conversation. I didn't come in here to talk, but to borrow a copy of Baudelaire, if you have one."

She turned to scan my shelves. I joined her and took down Les Fleurs du Mal. She thanked me, tucked the book under her arm, and went out.

Rather uncharitably I rejoiced in her soreness. It was good discipline. It would give her a sense of values. Should she ever get Jaffery back again, with no Liosha hanging round his neck, I was certain that not only would she forgive past mishandling, but for the sake of keeping him would put up with a little more. Whether she would marry him was another story. I had every reason to believe that she would not. Adrian reigned her bosom's lord. In her worshipping fidelity she never wavered. She regarded a second marriage with horror. That was comprehensible enough, with her husband but seven months dead. No, should she ever get Jaffery back, I didn't think she would marry him; but beyond doubt she would treat him with more consideration and respect. These, of course, were my conjectures and deductions (confirmed by Barbara) from the patent fact that she found herself lost without Jaffery and that she was furiously jealous of Liosha.

It was several weeks before we saw her again. August arrived. Barbara and I played the ever-fresh summer comedy. I swore by all my gods I would not leave Northlands. I went on vowing until I arrived with a mountain of luggage, a wife and a child and a maid at a great hotel on the Lido. Our days were unimportant. We bathed in the Adriatic. We revisited familiar churches and picture galleries in Venice. We mingled with a cosmopolitan crowd and developed the complexions (not only in our faces) of an Othello family. Doria, too, made holiday abroad. Every August, Mr. Jornicroft repaired the ravages of eleven months' civic and other feasting at Marienbad, and Doria, as she had done before her marriage, accompanied him. She and Barbara exchanged letters about nothing in particular. The time passed smoothly.

Once or twice we had word from our runagates. The fury of the sea having subsided after they had left Bordeaux, they had settled down to the normal life of shipboard, and Jaffery took his turn with the hands, coiled ropes, sweated over cargo, and kept his watch. Liosha, we were given to understand, besides helping in the galley and the cabin and swabbing decks, found much delight in painting the ship's boats with paint which Jaffery had bought for the purpose at Bordeaux. She had struck up a friendship with the first mate, who, possessing a camera, had taken their photographs. They sent us one of the two standing side by side, and a more villainous-looking yet widely smiling pair you could not wish to see. Both wore sailors' caps and jerseys and sea-boots, and Barbara's keen eye detected the fact that Liosha, for freedom's sake, had cut a foot or so off the bottom of her skirt without taking the trouble to hem up the edge, which, now frayed, hung about her calves in disgraceful fringes.

"I think you were wrong, my dear," said I. "The poor thing looks anything but utterly miserable."

"I'm sure I was right about her hands and skin," she maintained.

"Well, it's her own skin."

"More's the pity," Barbara retorted.

What on earth she meant, I do not know; but, as usual, she had the last word.

The middle of September found us back in England, and shortly afterwards Doria returned also, and resumed her lonely life in the Adrian-haunted flat. But by and by she grew restless, complaining that no one but her father, of whose society she had wearied, was in town, and went off on a series of country-house visits. The flat, I suspected, for all its sacred memories, was dull without Jaffery. She still maintained her unrelenting attitude, and spoke scornfully of him; but once or twice she asked when this mad voyage would be over, thereby betraying curiosity rather than indifference.

Meanwhile the autumn publishing season was in full swing. Wittekind's list of new novels in its deep black framing border stared at you from the advertisement pages of every periodical you picked up, and so did the list of every other publisher. Day after day Doria's eyes fell on this announcement of Wittekind, and day after day her indignation swelled at the continued omission of "The Greater Glory." All these nobodies, these ephemeral scribblers, were being thrust flamboyantly on public notice and her Adrian, the great Sun of the firm, was allowed to remain in eclipse. For what purpose had he lived and died if his memory was treated with this dark ingratitude? I strove to reason with her. Adrian's book had been prodigally advertised in the spring. It had sold enormously. It was still selling. There was no need to advertise it any longer. Besides, advertisement cost money, and poor Wittekind had to do his duty by his other authors. He had to push his new wares. "Tradesman!" cried Doria. If he wasn't, I remonstrated, if he wasn't a tradesman in a certain sense, an expert in the art of selling books, how could Adrian's novels have attained their wide circulation? It was to his interest to increase that circulation as much as possible. Why not let him run his very successful business his own way? Doria loftily assured me that she had no interest in his business, in the mere vulgar number of copies sold. Adrian's glory was above such sordid things. Of far higher importance was it that his name should be kept, like a beacon, before the public. Not to do so was callous ingratitude and tradesman's niggardliness on the part of Wittekind. Something ought to be done. I confessed my inability to do anything.

"I know you have nothing to do with the literary side of the executorship. Jaffery undertook it. And now, instead of looking after his duties, he has gone on this impossible voyage."

Here was another grievance against the unfortunate Jaffery. I might have asked her who drove him to Madagascar, for had she been kind, he would have made short work of Liosha, after having rescued her from Fendihook, and would have returned meekly to Doria's feet. But what would have been the use? I was tired of these windy arguments with Doria, and worn out with the awful irony of upholding our poor Adrian's genius.

"I'm sorry he's not here," said I, somewhat tartly, "because he might have prevailed upon you to listen to common sense."

A little while after this, another firm of publishers announced an edition de luxe of the works of a brilliant novelist cut off like Adrian in the flower of his age. It was printed on special paper and illustrated by a famous artist, and limited to a certain number of copies. This set Doria aflare. From Scotland, where she was paying one of her restless visits, she sent me the newspaper cutting. If the commercial organism, she said, that passed with Wittekind for a soul would not permit him to advertise Adrian's spring book in his autumn list, why couldn't he do like Mackenzie & Co., and advertise an edition de luxe of Adrian's two novels? And if Mackenzie & Co. thought it worth while to bring out such an edition of an entirely second-rate author, surely it would be to Wittekind's advantage to treat Adrian equally sumptuously. I advised her to write to Wittekind. She did. Accompanied by a fury of ink, she sent me his most courteous and sensible answer. Both books were doing splendidly. There was every prospect of a golden aftermath of cheap editions. The time was not ripe for an edition de luxe. It would come, a pleasurable thing to look forward to, when other sales showed signs of exhaustion.

"He talks about exhaustion," she wrote. "I suppose he means when he sends the volumes to be pulped, 'remainder or waste'—there's a foolish woman here who evidently has written a foolish book, and has shown me her silly contract with a publisher. 'Remainder or waste.' That's what he's thinking of. It's intolerable. I've no one, dear Hilary, to turn to but you. Do advise me."

I sent her a telegram. For one thing, it saved the trouble of concocting a letter, and, for another, it was more likely to impress the recipient. It ran:

* * * * *

"I advise you strongly to go to Wittekind yourself and bite him."

I was rather pleased at the humour—may I venture to qualify it as mordant?—of the suggestion. Even Barbara smiled. Of course, I was right. Let her fight it out herself with Wittekind.

But I have regretted that telegram ever since.



CHAPTER XXI

Luckily, I have kept most of Jaffery's letters written to me from all quarters of the globe. Excepting those concerned with the voyage of the S.S. Vesta, they were rare phenomena. Ordinarily, if I heard from him thrice a year I had to consider that he was indulging in an orgy of correspondence. But what with Doria and Adrian and Liosha, and what with Barbara and myself being so intimately mixed up in the matters which preoccupied his mind, the voyage of the Vesta covered a period of abnormal epistolary activity. Instead of a wife, our amateur sailor found a post office at every port. He wrote reams. He had the journalist's trick of instantaneous composition. Like the Ouidaesque hero, who could ride a Derby Winner with one hand, and stroke a University Crew to victory with the other, Jaffery could with one hand hang on to a rope over a yawning abyss, while with the other he could scribble a graphic account of the situation on a knee-supported writing-pad. In ordinary circumstances—that is to say in what, to Jaffery, were ordinary circumstances—he performed these literary gymnastics for the sake of his newspaper; but the voyage of the Vesta was an exceptional affair. Save incidentally—for he did send descriptive articles to The Daily Gazette—he was not out on professional business. The gymnastics were performed for my benefit—yet with an ulterior motive. He had sailed away, not on a job, but to satisfy a certain nostalgia, to escape from civilisation, to escape from Doria, to escape from desire and from heartache . . . and the deeper he plunged into the fatness of primitive life, the closer did the poor ogre come to heartache and to desire. He wrote spaciously, in the foolish hope that I would reply narrowly, following a Doria scent laid down with the naivete of childhood. I received constant telegrams informing me of dates and addresses—I who, Jaffery out of England, never knew for certain whether he was doing the giant's stride around the North Pole or horizontal bar exercise on the Equator. It was rather pathetic, for I could give him but little comfort.

Besides the letters, he (and Liosha) deluged us with photographs taken chiefly by the absurd second mate, from which it was possible to reconstruct the S.S. Vesta in all her dismalness. You have seen scores of her rusty, grimy congeners in any port in the world. You have only to picture an old, two-masted, well-decked tramp with smokestack and foul clutter of bridge-house amidships, and fore and aft a miserable bit of a deck broken by hatches and capstans and donkey-engines and stanchions and chains and other unholy stumbling blocks and offences to the casual promenader. From the photographs and letters I learned that the dog-hole, intended by the Captain for Jaffery, but given over to Liosha, was away aft, beneath a kind of poop and immediately above the scrunch of the propeller; and that Jaffery, with singular lack of privacy, bunked in the stuffy, low cabin where the officers took their meals and relaxations. The more vividly did they present the details of their life, the more heartfelt were my thanksgivings to a merciful Providence for having been spared so dreadful an experience.

Our two friends, however, found indiscriminate joy in everything; I have their letters to prove it. And Jaffery especially found perpetual enjoyment in the vagaries of Liosha. For instance, here is an extract from one of his letters:

"It's a grand life, my boy! You're up against realities all the time. Not a sham within the horizon. You eat till you burst, work till you sleep, and sleep till you're kicked awake. You should just see Liosha. Maturin says he has only met one other woman sailor like her, and that was the daughter of a trader sailing among the Islands, who had lived all her life since birth on his ship and had scarcely slept ashore. She's as much born to it as any shell-back on board. She has the amazing gift of looking part of the tub, like the stokers and the man at the wheel. Unlike another woman, she's never in the way, and the more work you can give her to do, the happier she is. She's in magnificent health and as strong as a horse. At first the hands didn't know what to make of her; now she's friends with the whole bunch. The difficulty is to keep her from overfamiliar intercourse with them, for though she signed on as cook's mate, she eats in the cabin with the officers, and between the cabin and the fo'c'sle lies a great gulf. They come and tell her about their wives and their girls and what rotten food they've got—'Everybody has got rotten food on board ship, you silly ass!' quoth Liosha. 'What do you expect—sweetbreads and ices?'—and what soul-shattering blighters they've shipped with, and what deeds of heroism (mostly imaginary) they have performed in pursuit of their perilous calling. They're all children, you know, when you come to the bottom of them, these hell-tearing fellows—children afflicted with a perpetual thirst and a craving to punch heads—and Liosha's a child, too; so there's a kind of freemasonry between them.

"There was the devil's own row in the fo'c'sle the other evening. The first mate went to look into it and found Liosha standing enraptured at the hatch looking down upon a free fight. There were knives about. The mate, being a blasphemous and pugilistic dog, soon restored order. Then he came up to Liosha—you and Barbara should have seen her—it was sultry, not a breath of air—and she just had on a thin bodice open at her throat and the sleeves rolled up and a short ragged skirt and was bareheaded.

"'Why the Hades didn't you stop 'em, missus?'

"For some reason or the other, the whole ship's company, except the skipper and myself, call her 'missus.' She gazed on him like an ox-eyed Juno; you know her way.

"'Why should I interfere with their enjoyment?'

"'Enjoyment—!' he gasped. 'Oh, my Gawd!' He flung out his arms and came over to me. I was smoking against the taffrail. 'There they was trying to cut one another's throats, and she calls it enjoyment.'

"He went off spluttering. I watched Liosha. A Dutchman—what you would call a Swede—a hulking beggar, came up from the fo'c'sle very much the worse for wear. Liosha says:

"'Mr. Andrews was very angry, Petersen.'

"He grinned. 'He was, missus.'

"'What was it all about?'

"He explained in his sea-English, which is not the English of that mildewed Boarding House in South Kensington. Bill Figgins had called him a ——, he had retaliated, and the others had taken a hand, too."

It is I who suppress the actual words reported by Jaffery. But, believe me, they were enough to annoy anybody.

"She shouted down the stairway. 'Here you, Bill Figgins, come on deck for a minute.'

"A lean, wiry, black-looking man-spawn of the Pool of London, emerged.

"'What's the matter?'

"Why did you call Petersen a ——?' she asked pleasantly and word-perfect.

"'Cos he is one.'

"'He isn't,' said Liosha. 'He's a very nice man. And so are you. And you both fought fine; I was looking on, and I was mad not to see the end of it. But Mr. Andrews doesn't like fighting. So see here, if you two don't shake hands, right now, and make friends and promise not to fight again, I'll not speak a word to either of you for the rest of the voyage.'

"If I had tackled them like this, hefty chap that I am, they would have consigned me to a shambles of perdition. And if any other woman had attempted it, even our valiant Barbara, they would have told her in perhaps polite, but anyhow forcible, terms to mind her own business. In either case they would have resented to the depths of their simple souls the alien interference. But with Liosha it was different. Of course sex told. Naturally. But she was a child like themselves. She had looked on, placidly, and had caught the flash of knives without turning a hair. They felt that if she were drawn into a melee she would use a knife with the best of them. I'm panning out about this, because it seems so deuced interesting and I should like to know what you and Barbara think. Do you remember Gulliver? For all the world it was like Glumdalclitch making the peace between two little nine-year-old Brobdingnagians. The two men looked at each other sheepishly. Half a dozen grinning heads appeared at the fo'c'sle hatch. You never saw anything so funny in your life. At last the lean Bill Figgins stuck out his hand sideways to the Dutchman, without looking at him.

"'All right, mate.'

"And the Swede shook it heartily, and the grimy hands cried 'Bravo, missus!' and Liosha, turning and catching sight of me just a bit abaft the funnel beneath the bridge, for the first time, swung up the deck towards me, as pleased as Punch."

* * * * *

Here is another extract. . . . Well, wait for a minute.

Jaffery's letters are an embarrassment of riches. If I printed them in full they would form a picturesque handbook to the coast of the African continent from Casablanca in Morocco, all the way round by the Cape of Good Hope to Port Said. But Jaffery, in his lavish way, duplicated these travel-pictures in articles to The Daily Gazette, which, supplemented by memory, he has already published in book form for all the world to read. Therefore, if I recorded his impressions of Grand Bassam, Cape Lopez, Boma, Matadi, Delagoa Bay, Montirana, Mombasa and other apocalyptic places, I should be merely plagiarising or infringing copyright, or what-not; and in any case I should be introducing matter entirely irrelevant to this chronicle. You must just imagine the rusty Vesta wallowing along, about nine knots an hour, around Africa, disgorging cotton goods and cheap jewelry at each God-forsaken port, and making up cargo with whatever raw material could find a European market. If I had gone this voyage, I would tell you all about it; but you see, I remained in England. And if I subjected Jaffery's correspondence to microscopic examination, and read up blue books on the exports and imports of all the places on the South African coast line, and told you exactly what was taken out of the S.S. Vesta and what was put into her, I cannot conceive your being in the slightest degree interested. To do so, would bore me to death. To me, cargo is just cargo. The transference of it from ship to shore and from shore to ship is a matter of awful noise and perspiring confusion. I have travelled, in so-called comfort, as a first-class passenger to Africa. I know all about it. Generally, the ship cannot get within quarter of a mile of the shore. On one side of it lies a fleet of flat-bottomed lighters manned by glistening and excited negroes. On board is a donkey-engine working a derrick with a Tophetical clatter. Vast bales and packing cases are lifted from the holds. A dingily white-suited officer stands by with greasy invoice sheets, while another at the yawning abyss whence the cargo emerges makes the tropical day hideous with horrible imprecations. And the merchandise swings over the side and is received in the lighter, by black uplifted arms, in the midst of a blood-curdling babel of unmeaning ferocity. That is all that unloading cargo means to me; and I cannot imagine that it means any more to any of the sons or daughters of men who are not intimately concerned in a particular trade. . . . You must imagine, I say, the S.S. Vesta repeating this monotonous performance; Jaffery and Liosha and the little, black-bearded skipper, all clad in decent raiment, going ashore, and being entertained scraggily or copiously by German, French, Portuguese, English, fever-eyed commissioners, who took them on the tour du proprietaire, among the white wooden government buildings, the palm-covered huts of the natives, and shewed them the Mission Chapels and the new Custom Houses and the pigeon-like fowls and the little dirty naked nigger children, and the exiguity of their stock of glass and china, and the yearning of their souls for the fleshpots of the respective Egypts to which they belonged. You must imagine this. If anything relevant to the story of Jaffery, which, as you will remember, is all that I have to relate, happened at any of these ports, I should tell you. I should have chapter and verse for it in Jaffery's letters. But as far as I can make out, the moment they put foot on shore, they behaved like the best-conducted globe-trotters who dwell habitually in a semi-detached residence in Peckham Rye. I know Jaffery will be furious when he reads this. But great is the Truth, and it shall prevail. It was on the sea, away from ports and mission stations and exiles hungering for the last word of civilisation, and shore-going clothes, that life as depicted by Jaffery swelled with juiciness; and to my taste, the juiciest parts of his letters are those humoristically concerned with the doings of Liosha.

As to his hopeless passion for Doria, he says very little. When Jaffery put pen to paper he was objective, loving to describe what he saw and letting what he felt go hang. In consequence the shy references to Doria were all the more poignant by reason of their rarity. But Liosha was the central figure in many a picture.

Here, I say, is another extract:

"Liosha continues to thrive exceedingly. But there's one thing that worries me about her. What the blazes are we going to do with her after this voyage? No doubt she would like to keep on going round and round Africa for the rest of her life. But I can't go with her. I must get back and begin to earn my living. And I don't see her settling down to afternoon tea and respectability again. I think I'll have to set her up as a gipsy with a caravan and a snarling tyke for company. How a creature with her physical energy has managed to lie listless for all these months I can't imagine. It shews strength of character anyway. But I don't see her putting in another long stretch. . . .

"She has taken her position as cook's mate seriously, and shares the galley with the cook, a sorrow-stricken little Portugee whose wife ran away with another man during the last trip. He pours out his woes to her while she wipes away the tears from the lobscouse. I don't know how she stands it, for even I, who've got a pretty strong stomach, draw the line at the galley. But she loves it. Now and again, when it's my watch—I'm on the starboard watch, you know—I see her turn out in the morning at two bells. She stands for a few moments right aft of her cabin-door, and fills her lungs. And the wind tugs at her hair beneath her cap, and at her skirts, and the spindrift from the pale grey sea of dawn stings at her face; and then she lurches like a sailor down the wet, slanting deck—and I can tell you, she looks a devilish fine figure of a woman. And soon afterwards there comes from the galley the smell of bacon and eggs—my son, if you don't know the conglomerate smell of fried bacon and eggs, bilge water, and the salt of the pure early morning ocean, your ideas of perfume are rudimentary. She and the Portugee between them, he contributing the science and she the good-will, give us excellent grub; of course you would turn your nose up at it—but you've never been hungry in your life! and there hasn't been a grumble in the cabin. Maturin has offered her the permanent job. Certainly she looks after us and attends to our comforts in a way sailor men on tramps aren't accustomed to. She's a great pal of the second mate's and at night they play spoiled-five at a corner of the table, with the greasiest pack of cards you ever saw, and she's perfectly happy.

"Now and again we discuss the future, without arriving at any result. A day or two ago I chaffed her about marriage. She considered the matter gravely.

"'I guess I'll have to. I'm twenty-four. But I haven't had much luck so far, have I?'

"I replied: 'You won't always strike wrong 'uns.'

"'I don't know what kind of a man I'm going to strike,' she said. 'Not any of those little billy-goats in dinner jackets I used to meet at Mrs. Jardine's. No, sirree. And no more Ras Fendihooks!'

"She rose—we had been sitting on the cabin sky-light—and leaned over the taffrail and looked wistfully out to sea. I joined her. She was silent for a bit. Then she said:

"'I guess I'm not going to marry at all; for I'm not going to marry a man I don't love, and I couldn't love a man who couldn't beat me—and there ain't many. That's the kind of fool way I'm built.'

"She turned and left me. I suppose she meant it. Liosha doesn't talk through her hat. But if she ever does fall in love with a man who can beat her, there'll be the devil to pay. Liosha in love would be a tornado of a spectacle. But I shouldn't like it. Honest—I shouldn't like it. I've got so used to this clean great Amazon of a Liosha, that I should loathe the fellow were he as decent a sort as you please."

It is curious to observe how, as the voyage proceeded, Jaffery's horizon gradually narrowed to the small shipboard circle, just as an invalid's interests become circumscribed by the walls of his sick-room. He tells us of childish things, a catch of fish, a quarrel between the first and second mate over Liosha, second having accused first of a disrespectful attitude towards the lady, the sail-cloth screen rigged up aft behind which Liosha had her morning tub of sea-water, the stubbing of Liosha's toe and her temporary lameness, the illness of the Portugee cook and Liosha's supremacy in the galley. And he wrote it all with the air of the impresario vaunting the qualities of his prima donna, nay more—with a fatuous air of proprietorship, as though he himself had created Liosha.

Here is the beginning of another letter, addressed to us both:

"A thousand thanks, dearest people, for what you tell me of Doria. If she just misses me a little bit, all may be well. I've bought some jolly gold barbaric ornaments that she may accept when I reach home; and do try to persuade her that the poor old bear is rough only on the outside.

"Things going on just as usual. Liosha has got a monkey given her by the donkey-man. . . ."

There follows a description of the monkey and its antics, and a long account of a chase all over the ship, in which all the ship's company including the captain took part, to the subversion of discipline and navigation. But you see—he switches off at once to Liosha and the trivial records of the humdrum day.

At last he had something less trivial to write about. They were in the Mozambique Channel, making for Madagascar:

"Now that this darned cabin table is comparatively straight, I can scribble a few lines to you. We've had a beast of a time. The dirtiest weather ever since we left Beira and the cranky old tub rolling and pitching and standing on her head as I've never known ship do before. Consequence was the cargo got shifted and there was a list to port, so that every time she ducked that side, she shipped half the channel. Skies black as thunder and the sea the colour of inky water. We had the devil's own job getting the cargo straight. Just imagine a black rolling dungeon full of great packing cases weighing about half a ton each all gone murderous mad. Just imagine getting down among them, as practically all hands had to do, save the engine-room, and sweating and fighting and straining and lashing for hour after hour. And half the time the port side of the lame old duck under water. How she didn't turn turtle is known only to Allah and Maturin; and One is great and the other's a damned fine sailor. Of course, I had to go down into the inferno of the hold like the others. Part of the day's work; but I didn't like it; no one liked it.

"When the order was given all hands tumbled up to the hatchway and began swarming down the iron ladder. It was a swaying, staggering crowd. When you stand on a wet deck at an angle of forty-five degrees one way and thirty degrees another and constantly shifting both angles, with nothing but a rope lashed athwart the ship to catch hold of, your mind is pretty well concentrated on yourself. I know mine was. I slipped and wallowed on my belly hanging on to the rope like grim death till my turn came for the ladder. I got my feet on the rungs. I was all right, when looking up into the livid daylight whom do you think I saw calmly preparing to follow me? Liosha. I hadn't noticed her. She had sea-boots and a jersey and looked just like a man. I roared:

"'Clear out. This is no place for you.'

"'I'm coming. Go along down.'

"She put her foot on the rung just below my face. I gripped as much of her ankle as the stiff leather allowed.

"'Clear out. Don't be a fool.'

"Andrews, the first mate, poured out a flood of blasphemy. What the this, that and the other were we waiting for?

"'Mr. Andrews,' I shouted, 'send this woman to her cabin.'

"'Oh, go to hell! Tumble down every one of you, or I'll damn soon make you,' cried Andrews.

"He was in a vile temper, being responsible for the snugness of the cargo, and the cargo lay about as snug as a dormitory of devils. He was sorry afterwards, poor chap, for his lack of courtesy, but at the moment he didn't care who went down into the hold, or who was killed, so long as this infernal cargo was righted and the crazy old tub didn't go down.

"So I descended. It was ordained. Liosha followed. And once down we were carried away out of ourselves by a nightmare of toil and peril. Andrews and second were there yelling orders. We obeyed in some subconscious way. How we heard I don't know. For peace and quiet give me a battlefield. Twenty men in semi-darkness, scarce able to stand, fighting blind, mad forces of half a ton each. The huge crates of deal seemed so innocent and harmless on the quay-side, but charging about that swaying, rocking lower deck, they looked malignant, like grimy blocks of Hell's anger. I don't know what I did. All I can say is that I never before felt my muscles about to snap—queer feeling that—and I think I'm about as tough as they make 'em.

"Liosha worked as well as any man in the bunch. I only caught sight of her now and then . . . you see what we had to do, don't you? . . . We had to secure all these infernal things that were running amuck and ease up the rest of the cargo that had got jammed on the port side. There were accidents. Three or four were knocked out. Petersen, the Swede, had his leg crushed. I don't know what was wrong at the time. He was working next me, and a roll of the ship brought an ugly crate over him. He couldn't get up. He looked ghastly. So I took him on my back and clawed my way up the iron ladder and reached the deck somehow, and staggered along, barging into everything—it was blowing half a gale—and once I fell and he screamed like a pig, poor devil. But I picked him up and got him into the fo'c'sle and stuck him in a bunk. The Portugee cook, sick of fever—I think he's a blighted malingerer—was the only creature there. I routed him out, in the dim mephitic place reeking of sour bedding, and put Petersen in his charge. Then I went back through the drenching seas to the hatch. There was just enough room for a man's body to squeeze through down the ladder. I went down into the same hell-broth of sweat and confusion. The ground you stood upon might have been the back of a super-Titanic butterfly. Stability was a nonexistent term. It was a helpless scuttering surge of men and vast wooden cubes. Most of the men had torn off their upper garments and fought half naked, the sweat glistening on their skins in the feeble light. Soon the heat became unbearable and I too tore off jersey and shirt. Liosha joined me and we worked together without speaking. Her long thick hair had come down and she had hastily tied it in a knot, just as you might tie a knot in a towel, and she had thrown off things like everybody else and only a flimsy cotton, sleeveless bodice, or whatever it's called, drenched through and sticking to her, made a pretence of covering her from her waist.

"You had to get like flies round these infernal things and wait your time—if you could—for the roll, and push and then scramble with ropes and make fast; awl at the same time dance out of the way of the slithering hulks that bore down on you with fantastic murderousness. And through it all thundered the roaring of the storm, the grind of the engines, the shattering of the propeller lifted above the waves, and the shrieks and creakings of every plank and plate of this steam-driven old Noah's Ark.

"We had just, with exhausted muscles, made a whole stack fast, and were standing by, panting, haggard eyed, the sweat running down anyhow, twenty of us, Dagoes, Dutchmen, Englishmen, in the dim twilight—just a shaft of pale illumination coming slick down the ladder where the hatch was open,—hanging on to edges and corners of cargo, when suddenly the ship, caught on top of a wave, vibrated in a sickening shudder, plunged, and then with an impetus of cataclysm wallowed to starboard. Andrews shrieked, 'Stand clear!' Most of the men leaped and flung themselves away. But I stumbled and fell. Before I realized the danger of a vast sliding crate, two strong arms were curled round my waist and I was flung aside, to slither and roll down the swaying deck until I was stopped by the bulkhead. When I picked myself up, I saw half the men securing the crate and the other half grovelling around something on the deck. It was Liosha. She lay white and senseless with blood streaming from her head.



"In a mortal funk I took her up the ladder with the help of another fellow, and carried her to her cabin. I never before realised the appalling length of this vessel. We got her into her bunk aft; I sent the other chap for brandy and first-aid appliances from the ship's stores, and did what I could to discover how far she was injured. . . .

"Thank God, nothing worse had happened than a nasty scalp wound. But her escape had been miraculous. She had saved my life; for as I lay on the deck, the crate charging direct would have squashed my skull into jelly, and crushed my body against the side of the hold. A fraction of a second later and it would have been her skull and her body instead of mine; but she just managed to roll practically clear until she got caught by the swerving side of the crate. I hope you'll understand what a heroic thing she did. She faced what seemed to be certain death for me; and it is thanks to Liosha that I'm able to tell you that I'm alive. And she, God bless her, walks about with her head bandaged, among an adoring ship's company, and refuses to admit having done anything wonderful."

And, indeed, to confirm Jaffery's last statement, here is a bit of a scrawl from Liosha—her complete account of the incident:

"We've just had the most awful storm I ever did see. The cargo go loose in the hold and we had to fix it up. I got a cut on the head and had to stay in bed till the storm finished. I must say it gave me an awful headache, but there I guess I'm better now."

Well, that seems to be the most exciting thing that happened to them. Afterwards, in the mind of each, it loomed as the great event in the amazing voyage. A man does not forget having his life saved by a woman at the risk of her own; and a woman, no matter how heroic in action and how magnanimous in after modesty, does not forget it either. Although he had been credited (to his ingenuous delight) by reviewers of "The Greater Glory" with uncanny knowledge of the complexities of a woman's nature, I have never met a more dunder-headed blunderer in his dealings with women. He perceived the symptoms of this unforgetfulness on Liosha's part, but seems to have been absolutely fogged in diagnosis.

"Liosha flourishes," he writes in one of his last Vesta letters, "like a virgin forest of green bay trees. Gosh! She's splendid. I take back and swallow every presumptuous word I've said about her. And, I suppose, owing to our knockabout sort of intimacy, she has adopted a protective, motherly attitude towards me. In her great, spacious, kind way, she gives you the impression that she owns Jaffery Chayne, and knows exactly what is for his good. Women's ways are wonderful but weird."

He must have thought himself vastly clever with his alliterative epigram. But he hadn't the faintest idea of the fount of Liosha's motherliness.

"Owing to our knockabout sort of intimacy"! Oh, the silly ass!



CHAPTER XXII

It was not until the end of October that Doria completed her round of country-house visits and returned to the flat in St. John's Wood. The morning after her arrival in town she took my satirical counsel and called at Wittekind's office, and, I am afraid, tried to bite that very pleasant, well-intentioned gentleman. She went out to do battle, arraying herself in subtle panoply of war. This I gather from Barbara's account of the matter. She informs me that when a woman goes to see her solicitor, her banker, her husband's uncle, a woman she hates, or a man who really understands her, she wears in each case an entirely different kind of hat. Judging from a warehouse of tissue-paper-covered millinery at the top of my residence, which I once accidentally discovered when tracking down a smell of fire, I know that this must be true. Costumes also, Barbara implies, must correspond emotionally with the hats. I recognised this, too, as philosophic truth; for it explained many puzzling and apparently unnecessary transformations in my wee wife's personal appearance. And yet, the other morning when I was going up to town to see after some investments, and I asked her which was the more psychological tie, a green or a violet, in which to visit my stockbroker, she lost as much of her temper as she allows herself to lose and bade me not he silly. . . . But this has nothing to do with Doria.

Doria, I say, with beaver cocked and plumes ruffled, intent on striking terror into the heart of Wittekind, presented herself in the outer office and sent in her card. At the name of Mrs. Adrian Boldero, doors flew open, and Doria marched straight away into Wittekind's comfortably furnished private room. Wittekind himself, tall, loose-limbed, courteous, the least tradesman-like person you can imagine, rose to receive her. For some reason or the other, or more likely against reason, she had pictured a rather soapy, smug little man hiding crafty eyes behind spectacles; but here he was, obviously a man of good breeding, who smiled at her most charmingly and gave her to understand that she was the one person in the world whom he had been longing to meet. And the office was not a sort of human charcuterie hung round with brains of authors for sale, but a quiet, restful place to which valuable prints on the walls and a few bits of real Chippendale gave an air of distinction. Doria admits to being disconcerted. She had come to bite and she remained to smile. He seated her in a nice old armchair with a beautiful back—she was sensitive to such things—and spoke of Adrian as of his own blood brother. She had not anticipated such warmth of genuine feeling, or so fine an appreciation of her Adrian's work.

"Believe me, my dear Mrs. Boldero," said he, "I am second only to you in my admiration and grief, and there's nothing I wouldn't do to keep your husband's memory green. But it is green, thank goodness. How do I know? By two signs. One that people wherever the English language is spoken are eagerly reading his books—I say reading, because you deprecate the purely commercial side of things; but you must forgive me if I say that the only proof of all their reading is the record of all their buying. And when people buy and read an author to this prodigious extent, they also discuss him. Adrian Boldero's name is a household word. You want advertisement and an edition de luxe. But it is only the little man that needs the big drum."

"But still, Mr. Wittekind," Doria urged, "an edition de luxe would be such a beautiful monument to him. I don't care a bit about the money," she went on with a splendid disregard of her rights that would have sent a shiver down the incorporated back of the Incorporated Society of Authors, "I'm only too willing to contribute towards the expense. Please understand me. It's a tribute and a monument."

"You only put up monuments to those who are dead," said Wittekind.

"But my husband—"

"—isn't dead," said he.

"Oh!" said Doria. "Then—"

"The time for your edition de luxe is not yet."

"Yet? But—you don't think Adrian's work is going to die?"

She looked at him tragically. He reassured her.

"Certainly not. Our future sumptuous edition will be a sign that he is among the immortals. But an edition de luxe now would be a wanton Hic jacet."

All of this may have been a bit sophistical, but it was sound business from the publisher's point of view, and conveyed through the medium of Wittekind's unaffected urbanity it convinced Doria. I listened to her account of it with a new moon of a smile across my soul—or across whatever part of oneself one smiles with when one's face is constrained to immobility.

"I'm so glad I plucked up courage to come and see you, Mr. Wittekind," she said. "I feel much happier. I'm quite content to leave Adrian's reputation in your hands. I wish, indeed, I had come to see you before." "I wish you had," said he.

"Mr. Chayne has been most kind; but—"

"Jaffery Chayne isn't you," he laughed. "But all the same, he's a splendid fellow and an admirable man of business."

"In what way?" she asked, rather coldly.

"Well—so prompt."

"That's the very last word I should apply to him. He took an unconscionable time," said Doria.

"He had a very difficult and delicate work of revision to do. Your husband's work was a first draft. The novel had to be pulled together. He did it admirably. That sort of thing takes time, although it was a labour of love."

"It merely meant writing in bits of scenes. Oh, Mr. Wittekind," she cried, reverting to an old grievance, "I do wish I could see exactly what he wrote and what Adrian wrote. I've been so worried! Why do your printers destroy authors' manuscripts?"

"They don't," said Wittekind. "They don't get them nowadays. They print from a typed copy."

"'The Greater Glory' was printed from my husband's original manuscript."

Wittekind smiled and shook his head. "No, my dear Mrs. Boldero. From two typed copies—one in England and one in America."

"Mr. Chayne told me that in order to save time he sent you Adrian's original manuscript with his revisions."

"I'm sure you must have misunderstood him," said Wittekind. "I read the typescript myself. I've never seen a line of your husband's manuscript."

"But 'The Diamond Gate' was printed from Adrian's manuscript."

"No, no, no. That, too, I read in type."

Doria rose and the colour fled from her cheeks and her great dark eyes grew bigger, and she brought down her little gloved hand on the writing desk by which the publisher, cross-kneed, was sitting. He rose, too.

"Mr. Chayne has definitely told me that both Adrian's original manuscripts went to the printers and were destroyed by the printers."

"It's impossible," said Wittekind, in much perplexity. "You're making some extraordinary mistake."

"I'm not. Mr. Chayne would not tell me a lie."

Wittekind drew himself up. "Neither would I, Mrs. Boldero. Allow me."

He took up his "house" telephone. "Ask Mr. Forest to come to me at once." He turned to Doria. "Let us get to the bottom of this. Mr. Forest is my literary adviser—everything goes through his hands."

They waited in silence until Mr. Forest appeared. "You remember the Boldero manuscripts?"

"Of course."

"What were they, manuscript or typescript?"

"Typescript."

"Have you even seen any of Mr. Boldero's original manuscript?"

"No."

"Do you think any of it has ever come into the office?"

"I'm sure it hasn't."

"Thank you, Mr. Forest."

The reader retired.

"You see," said Wittekind.

"Then where are the original manuscripts of 'The Diamond Gate' and 'The Greater Glory'?"

"I'm very sorry, dear Mrs. Boldero, but I have no means of knowing."

"Mr. Chayne said they were sent here, and used by the printers and destroyed by the printers."

"I'm sure," said Wittekind, "there's some muddling misunderstanding. Jaffery Chayne, in his own line, is a distinguished man—and a man of unblemished honour. A word or two will clear up everything."

"He's in Madagascar."

"Then wait till he comes back."

Doria insisted—and who in the world can blame her for insisting?

"You may think me a silly woman, Mr. Wittekind; but I'm not—not to the extent of an hysterical invention. Mr. Chayne has told me definitely that those two manuscripts came to your office, that the books were printed from them and that they were destroyed by the printers."

"And I," said Wittekind, "give you my word of honour—and I have also given you independent testimony—that no manuscript of your husband's has ever entered this office."

"Suppose they had come in his handwriting, would they have been destroyed?"

"Certainly not. Every sheet would have been returned with the proofs. Typed copy may or may not be returned."

"But autograph copy is valuable?"

"Naturally."

"The manuscripts of Adrian's novels might be worth a lot of money?"

"Quite a lot of money."

"So you don't think Mr. Chayne destroyed them?"

"It's an act of folly of which a literary man like Mr. Chayne would be incapable."

"And you've never seen any of it?"

"I've given you my word of honour."

"Then it's very extraordinary," said Doria.

"It is," said Wittekind, stiffly.

She thrust out her hand and flashed a generous glance.

"Forgive me for being bewildered. But it's so upsetting. You have nothing whatever to do with it. It's all Jaffery Chayne." She looked up at the loosely built, kindly man. "It's for him to give explanations. In the meanwhile, I leave my dear, dear husband's memory in your hands—to keep green, as you say"—tears came into her eyes—"and you will, won't you?"

The pathos of her attitude dissolved all resentment. He bent over her, still holding her hand.

"You may be quite sure of that," said he. "Even we publishers have our ideals—and our purest is to distribute through the world the works of a man of genius."

So Doria having telephoned for permission to come and see us on urgent business, arrived at Northlands late in the afternoon, full of the virtues of Wittekind and the vices of Jaffery. She gave us a full account of her interview and appealed to me for explanations of Jaffery's extraordinary conduct. I upbraided myself bitterly for having counselled her to bite Wittekind. I ought, instead, to have thrown every possible obstacle in the way of her meeting him. I ought to have foreseen this question of the manuscripts, the one weak spot in our web of deception. Now I may be a liar when driven by necessity from the paths of truth, but I am not an accomplished liar. It is not my fault. Mere providence has guided my life through such gentle pastures that I have had no practice worth speaking of. Barbara, too, is an amateur in mendacity. Both of us were sorely put to it under Doria's indignant and suspicious cross-examination.

"You saw the original manuscript of 'The Greater Glory'?"

"Yes," I lied.

"Did you see the original manuscript of 'The Diamond Gate'?"

"No," I lied again.

"Was it among Adrian's papers?"

"Not to my knowledge. Probably if Adrian didn't send it to the printers, he destroyed it."

"I don't believe he destroyed it. Jaffery has got it, and he has also got the manuscript of 'The Greater Glory.' What does he want them for?"

"That's a leading question, my dear, which I can't answer, because I don't know whether he has them or not. In fact, I know nothing whatever about them."

"It sounds horrid and ungracious, Hilary, after all you've done for me," said Doria, "but I really think you ought to know something."

From her point of view, and from any outside person's point of view, she was perfectly right. My bland ignorance was disgraceful. If she had brought an action against us for recovery of these wretched manuscripts and we managed to keep the essential secret, both counsel and judge would have flayed me alive. . . . Put yourself in her place for a minute—God knows I tried to do so hard enough—and you will see the logic of her position, all through. She was not a woman of broad human sympathies and generous outlook; she was intense and narrow. Her whole being had been concentrated on Adrian during their brief married life; it was concentrated now on his memory. To her, as to all the world, he flamed a dazzling meteor. Her faults, which were many and hard to bear with, all sprang from the bigotry of love. Nothing had happened to cloud her faith. She had come up against many incomprehensible things: the delay in publication of Adrian's book; the change of title; the burning of Adrian's last written words on the blotting pad; the vivid pictures that were obviously not Adrian's; the consignment to a printer's Limbo of the original manuscripts; my own placid disassociation from the literary side of the executorship. She had accepted them—not without protest; but she had in fact accepted them. Now she struck a reef of things more incomprehensible still. Jaffery had lied to her outrageously. I, for one, hold her justified in her indignation.

But what on earth could I do? What on earth could my poor Barbara do? We sat, both of us, racking our brains for some fantastic invention, while Doria, like a diminutive tragedy queen, walked about my library, inveighing against Jaffery and crying for her manuscripts. And I dared not know anything at all about them. She had every reason to reproach me.

Barbara, feeling very uncomfortable, said: "You mustn't blame Hilary. When Adrian died each of the executors took charge of a special department. Jaffery Chayne did not interfere with Hilary's management of financial affairs, and Hilary left Jaffery free with the literary side of things. It has worked very well. This silly muddle about the manuscripts doesn't matter a little bit."

"But it does matter," cried Doria.

And it did. Now that she knew that those sacred manuscripts written by the dear, dead hand had not been destroyed by printers, every fibre of her passionate self craved their possession. We argued futilely, as people must, who haven't the ghost of a case.

"But why has Jaffery lied?"

"The manuscript of 'The Diamond Gate,'" I declared, again perjuring myself, "has nothing whatever to do with Jaffery and me. As I've told you it was not among Adrian's papers which we went through together. We're narrowed down to 'The Greater Glory.' Possibly," said I, with a despairing flash, "Jaffery had to pull it about so much and deface it with his own great scrawl, that he thought it might pain you to see it, and so he told you that it had disappeared at the printer's. Now that I remember, he did say something of the kind."

"Yes, he did," said Barbara.

Doria brushed away the hypothesis. "You poor things! You're merely saying that to shield him. A blind imbecile could see through you"—I have already apologised to you for our being the unconvincing liars that we were—"you know nothing more about it than I do. You ought to, as I've already said. But you don't. In fact, you know considerably less. Shall I tell you where the manuscripts are at the present moment?"

"No, my dear," said Barbara, in the plaintive voice of one who has come to the end of a profitless talk; for you cannot imagine how utterly wearied we were with the whole of the miserable business. "Let us wait till Jaffery comes home. It won't be so very long."

"Yes, Doria," said I, soothingly. "Barbara's right. You can't condemn a man without a hearing?"

Doria laughed scornfully. "Can't I? I'm a woman, my dear friend. And when a woman condemns a man unheard she's much more merciful than when she condemns him after listening to his pleadings. Then she gets really angry, and perhaps does the man injustice."

I gasped at the monstrous proposition; but Barbara did not seem to detect anything particularly wrong about it.

"At any rate," said I, "whether you condemn him or not, we can't do anything until he comes home. So we had better leave it at that."

"Very well," said Doria. "Let us leave it for the present. I don't want to be more of a worry to you dear people than I can help. But that's where Adrian's manuscripts are, both of them"—and she pointed to the key of Jaffery's flat hanging with its staring label against my library wall.

Of course it was rather mean to throw the entire onus on to Jaffery. But again, what could we do? Doria put her pistol at our heads and demanded Adrian's original manuscripts. She had every reason to believe in their existence. Wittekind had never seen them. Vandal and Goth and every kind of Barbarian that she considered Jaffery to be, it was inconceivable that he had deliberately destroyed them. It was equally inconceivable that he had sold the precious things for vulgar money. They remained therefore in his possession. Why did he lie? We could supply no satisfactory answer; and the more solutions we offered the more did we confirm in her mind the suspicion of dark and nefarious dealings. If it were only to gain time in order to think and consult, we had to refer her to the absent Jaffery.

"My dear," said I to Barbara, when we were alone, "we're in a deuce of a mess."

"I'm afraid we are."

"Henceforward," said I, "we're going to live like selfish pigs, with no thought about anybody but ourselves and our own little pig and about anything outside our nice comfortable sty."

"We'll do nothing of the kind," said Barbara.

"You'll see," said I. "I'm a lion of egotism when I'm roused."

We dined and had a pleasant evening. Doria did not raise the disastrous topic, but talked of Marienbad and her visits, and discussed the modern tendencies of the drama. She prided herself on being in the forefront of progress, and found no dramatic salvation outside the most advanced productions of the Incorporated Stage Society. I pleaded for beauty, which she called wedding-cake. She pleaded for courage and truth in the presentation of actual life, which I called dull and stupid photography which any dismal fool could do. We had quite an exciting and entirely profitless argument.

"I'm not going to listen any longer," she cried at last, "to your silly old early Victorian platitudes!"

"And I," I retorted, "am not going to be browbeaten in my own home by one-foot-nothing of crankiness and chiffon."

So, laughingly, we parted for the night, the best of friends. If only, I thought, she could sweep her head clear of Adrian, what a fascinating little person she might be. And I understood how it had come to pass that our hulking old ogre had fallen in love with her so desperately.

The next morning I was in the garden, superintending the planting of some roses in a new, bed, when Doria, in hat and furs, came through my library window, and sang out a good-bye. I hurried to her.

"Surely not going already? I thought you were at least staying to lunch."

No; she had to get back to town. The car, ordered by Barbara, was waiting to take her to the station.

"I'll see you into the train," said I.

"Oh, please don't trouble."

"I will trouble," I laughed, and I accompanied her down the slope to the front door where stood Barbara by the car and Franklin with the luggage. Doria and I drove to the station. For the few minutes before the train came in we walked up and down the platform. She was in high spirits, full of jest and laughter. An unwonted flush in her cheeks and a brightness in her deep eyes rendered her perfectly captivating.

"I haven't seen you looking so well and so pretty for ever such a long time," I said.

The flush deepened. "You and Barbara have done me all the good in the world. You always do. Northlands is a sort of Fontaine de Jouvence for weary people."

That was as graceful as could be. And when she shook hands with me a short while afterwards through the carriage window, she thanked me for our long-sufferance with more spontaneous cordiality than she had ever before exhibited. I returned to my roses, feeling that, after all, we had done something to help the poor little lady on her way. If I had been a cat, I should have purred. After an hour or so, Barbara summoned me from my contemplative occupation.

"Yes, dear?" said I, at the library window.

"Have you written to Rogers?"

Rogers was a plumber.

"He's a degraded wretch," said I, "and unworthy of receiving a letter from a clean-minded man."

"Meanwhile," said Barbara, "the servants' bathroom continues to be unusable."

"Good God!" said I, "does Rogers hold the cleanliness of this household in his awful hands?"

"He does."

"Then I will sink my pride and write to him."

"Write now," said Barbara, leading me to my chair. "You ought to have done it three days ago."

So with three days' bathlessness of my domestic staff upon my conscience, and with Barbara at my elbow, I wrote my summons. I turned in my chair, holding it up in my hand.

"Is this sufficiently dignified and imperious?"

I began to declaim it. "Sir, it has been brought to my notice that the pipes—". I broke off short. "Hullo!" said I, my eyes on the wall, "what has become of the key of Jaffery's flat?"

There was the brass-headed nail on which I had hung it, impertinently and nakedly bright. The labelled key had vanished.

"You've got it in your pocket, as usual," said Barbara.

I may say that I have a habit of losing things and setting the household from the butler to the lower myrmidons of the kitchen in frantic search, and calling in gardeners and chauffeurs and nurses and wives and children to help, only to discover that I have had the wretched object in my pocket all the time. So accustomed is Barbara to this wolf-cry that if I came up to her without my head and informed her that I had lost it, she would be profoundly sceptical.

But this time I was blameless. "I haven't touched it," I declared, "and I saw it this morning."

"I don't know about this morning," said Barbara. "But I grant you it was there yesterday evening, because Doria drew our attention to it."

"Doria!" I cried, and I rose, with mouth agape, and our eyes met in a sudden stare.

"Good Heavens! do you think she has taken it?"

"Who else?" said I. "She came out from here to say good-bye to me in the garden. She had the opportunity. She was preternaturally animated and demonstrative at the station—your sex's little guileful way ever since the world began. She had the stolen key about her. She's going straight to Jaffery's flat to hunt for those manuscripts."

"Well, let her," said Barbara. "We know she can't find them, because they don't exist."

"But, my darling Barbara," I cried, "everything else does. And everything else is there. And there's not a blessed thing locked up in the place!"

"Do you mean—?" she cried aghast.

"Yes, I do. I must get up to town at once and stop her."

"I'll come with you," said Barbara.

So once more, on altruistic errand, I motored post-haste to London. We alighted at St. Quentin's Mansions. My friend the porter came out to receive us.

"Has a lady been here with a key of Mr. Chayne's flat?"

"No, sir, not to my knowledge."

We drew breaths of relief. Our journey had been something of a strain.

"Thank goodness!" said Barbara.

"Should a lady come, don't allow her to enter the flat," said I.



"I shouldn't give a strange lady entrance in any case," said the porter.

"Good!" said I, and I was about to go. But Barbara, with her ready common-sense, took me aside and whispered:

"Why not take all these compromising manuscripts home with us?"

In my letter case I had the half-forgotten power of attorney that Jaffery had given me at Havre. I shewed it to the porter.

"I want to get some things out of Mr. Chayne's flat."

"Certainly, sir," said the porter. "I'll take you up."

We ascended in the lift. The porter opened Jaffery's door. We entered the sitting-room. And there, in a wilderness of ransacked drawers and strewn papers, with her head against the cannon-ball on the hearthrug, lay a tiny, black, moaning heap of a woman.



CHAPTER XXIII

If a ministering angel walks abroad through this world of many sorrows, it is my wife Barbara. To her and to her alone did the soul-stricken little creature owe her life and her reason. For a fortnight she scarcely left Doria's room, sleeping for odd hours anywhere, and snatching meals with the casual swiftness of a swallow. For a whole fortnight she wrestled with the powers of darkness, which like Apollyon straddled quite over all the breadth of the way, and by sheer valiancy and beauty of heart, she made them spread forth their dragon's wings and speed them away so that Doria for a season saw them no more. How she fought and with what weapons, who am I to tell you? These things are written down; but in a Book which no human eye can see.

We carried her moaning and distraught from that room of awful revelation, put her into the car, and brought her back to Northlands. It was the only thing to be done. Barbara's instinct foresaw madness if we took her to the flat in St. John's Wood. Her father's house, her natural refuge, was equally impossible. For what explanation could we have given to the worthy but uncomprehending man? He would have called in doctors to minister to a mind afflicted with a disease beyond their power of diagnosis. Unless, of course, we made public the facts of the tragedy; which was unthinkable. Barbara's instinct pierced surely through the gloom. The first coherent words that Doria said were:

"Let me stay with you for a little. I've nowhere in the world to go. I can't ask father—and I can't go back home. It would drive me mad."

Of course it would have driven her mad to return to the haunted flat—haunted now by no gracious ghost, but by an Unutterable Presence, the thought of which, even in her quiet, lavender-scented country bedroom, made her scream of nights. For she knew all. To save her reason, Barbara, with her wonderful tenderness, had bridged over the chasms between her stark peaks of discovery. She knew all that we knew. Further attempts at deception would have been vain cruelty. Barbara could palliate the offence; she could show how irresistible had been the temptation; she could prove how our love for Adrian had been unshaken by disastrous knowledge and urge that Doria's love should be unshaken likewise; she could apply all the healing remedies of which she only has the secret—but she could not leave the poor soul to stumble blindly in uncertainty.

Doria could never enter her dishallowed paradise again. Even I, when I went through the place in order to make arrangements for closing it altogether, felt a teeth-chattering shiver in the condemned cell where Adrian had worked out his doom. It had been sacrosanct; not a thing had been disturbed; there was the iron safe empty, but yet a grim receptacle of abominable secrets; the quill pen, its point stained with idle ink, lay on the office writing-table. And the blotting-pad was still there under a clump of dusty, unused scribbling-paper. On a little stool in the corner stood the half-emptied decanter of brandy and a glass and a syphon of soda-water. . . . Goodness knows, I'm not a superstitious or even an imaginative man; I had been in that room before and had hated it, on account of its poignant associations; nothing transcendental had affected me; but now I shuddered, physically shuddered, as though the cubic space were informed with a spirit in the torture of an everlasting despair. Doria not knowing, he could have borne his punishment. But now Doria knew. He had lost her love, the rock on which he had built his hope of salvation. He was damned to eternity. It is the supreme and unspeakable horror of eternal life that you cannot dash your head against a wall and plunge into nothingness. Yet he tried. The awful Presence of Adrian was dashing his head against those bare and ghastly walls. . . .

I never was so glad to breathe God's honest November fog again. Of course my affright was a silly matter of nerves. But I would not have slept in that flat for anything in the world.

I had to make, of course, another expedition to Jaffery's chambers, in order to restore to order the chaos that Doria had made. She had ransacked every drawer in the place and strewn the contents of the old portmanteau, Adrian's mass of incoherent manuscript, about the floor. I did what I ought to have done on my first visit; I brought the tragic lumber to Northlands, and having made a bonfire in a corner of the kitchen garden, burned the whole lot. Why Jaffery had not got rid of the evidence of Adrian's guilt, I could not at the time imagine. It was only later that I heard the trivial and mechanical reason. He could not burn the papers in his flat, because he had no fire—only the electric radiator. You try, in these circumstances, to destroy five or six thousand sheets of thick paper, and see how you get on. Jaffery had his idea, when he transferred the manuscript from Adrian's study; on his next voyage he would take the portmanteau with him, weight it with the cannon-ball, which he used after his bath for physical exercise, and throw it overboard. By singular ill-luck, he had started on his two voyages that year—if a channel crossing can be termed a voyage—at a moment's notice. In each case he had not had occasion to call at his chambers, and the destroying journey had yet to be made. As for discovery of the secrets lying in unlocked receptacles, who was there to discover them? Such friends as he had would never pry into his private concerns; and as for housemaids and waiters and porters, the whole matter to them was unintelligible. While he was living in St. Quentin's Mansions, he considered himself secure. When he realised, at Havre, that he would be absent for some months, he put things into my charge. That I bitterly regretted not having put tinder lock and key or taken steps to destroy papers and manuscripts, I need not say. For a long time I felt the guiltiest wretch outside prison in the three kingdoms. If I had been a wild man of the jungle like Jaffery, it would not have mattered; but I have always prided myself on being—not the last word, for that would not be consonant with my natural modesty—but, say, the penultimate word of our modern civilisation; and the memory of having acted like an ingenuous child of nature still burns whenever it floats across my brain. Metaphorically, Jaffery and I sobbed with remorse on each other's bosoms, and called ourselves all the picturesque synonyms for careless fools we could think of; but that, naturally, did not a bit of good to anybody.

The fact was accomplished. Our dear Humpty-Dumpty had had his great fall, and not all the king's horses and all the king's men could ever set Humpty-Dumpty up again.

Greek tragedies are all very well in their way. They are vastly interesting in the inevitableness of their prearranged doom. Moi qui vous parle, I have read all of them; and I like them. I have even seen some of them acted. I have seen, for instance, the Agamemnon given by the boys of Bradfield College, in their model open-air Greek theatre, built out of a chalk-pit, and I have sat gripped from beginning to end by the tremendous drama. I am not talking foolishly. I know as much as the ordinary man need know about Greek tragedy. But in spite of Aristotle (who ought to have been strangled at birth, like all other bland doctrinaires—and of all the doctrinaires on art, there has none been so blandly egregious since the early morning long ago when the pre-historic artist who drew an elk on the omoplate of a bison was clubbed by the superior person of his day who could not draw for nuts)—in spite of Aristotle and the rest of the theorists, I assert that, as far as my experience goes, in the ordinary wary modern life to which we are accustomed, doom and inevitableness do not matter a hang. If we have any common-sense we can dodge them. Most of us do. Of course, if a woman marries a congenital idiot there are bound to be ructions—here we are entering the domain of pathology, which is as doomful as you please; but in our ordinary modern life ninety per cent. of the tragedies are determined by sheer million to one fortuities. The history of our great criminal trials, for instance, is a romance of coincidence. It is your melodramatist and not your Aristotelian purist that knows what he's talking about when he writes a play. He only has to look about him and draw what happens in real life. That there may be an Eternal Puckish Malice arranging and deranging human destinies is another question. I am neither a theologian nor a metaphysician, and I do not desire to discuss the subject. I only maintain that, had it not been for sheer chance, Adrian's secret would never have been discovered a second time. I cannot see any doom about it. A series of sheer, silly accidents on the part of Jaffery and myself had brought Doria face to face with these incriminating papers. As for her having gained access to the flat without the porter's knowledge, that had been calculation on her part. She had watched at the street entrance until he had taken some one up in the lift, and then she had mounted the interminable stairs.

I could have caught Jaffery by letter at Genoa or Marseilles; but in view of his imminent return, I did not write to him. What useful purpose would have been served? He would have left the steamship Vesta and travelled post-haste overland, dragging with him a resentful Liosha, and rushed like a mad bull into an upheaval in which he could have no place. We had arranged by correspondence that, after he had parted from the good Captain Maturin at Havre, he would come straight to us, in order to leave Liosha temporarily in our care. For what else could be done with her? Let him bring her, then, according to programme. It would be far better, we agreed, Barbara and I, to let them fulfil their lunatic adventure undisturbed, and on Jaffery's arrival at Northlands to break the disastrous tidings. It would give us time to watch Doria and see what direction the resultant of the forces now tearing her soul would take.

"Let Jaffery stay away as long as possible," said Barbara. "I can't be bothered with him. I wish his old voyage could be extended for a year."

* * * * *

The first time I met Doria, when she crawled out of her room, a great pity smote my heart. The ivory of her face had turned to wax, and she had dwindled into a fragile reed, and in her eyes quivered the apprehension of an ill-treated dog. I put my arm round her and hugged her reassuringly, not knowing what else to do, and mumbled a few silly words. Then I settled her down before the drawing-room fire, and rushed out into the garden and cut the last poor lingering autumn roses, and, returning, cast them into her lap. And we talked hard about the roses; and I told her which were Madame Abel Chatenay, which Marquise de Salisbury, and which Frau Karl Druska, which Lady Ursula and which Lady Hillingdon. We did not refer at all to unhappy things.

It was only some days afterwards that she ventured to raise the veil of her awful desolation. But she had no need to tell me. Any fool could have divined it. Together with far less shattering of idols has many a woman's reason been brought down. And in our poor Doria's case it was not only the shattering of idols.

"Hilary, dear," she said, with a mournful attempt at a smile. "I can't go on living here for ever."

"Why not?" I asked. "This is a vast barrack of a place, and you're only just a bit of a wee white mouse. And we love our pets. Why do you want to go?"

We were walking up and down the drive. It was a warm, damp morning and the trees shaken by the mild southwester shed their leaves around us in a golden shower; and the leaves that had fallen lay sodden on the grass borders. Here and there a surviving blossom of antirrhinum swaggered among its withered brethren as if to maintain the illusion of summer. A partridge or two whirred across the path from copse to meadow. The gentle sadness of the autumn day had moved her to discourse on the mutability of mundane things. Hence, by chain of association, I suppose, her sudden remark.

"I don't want to go," she replied. "I should like to stay in the dreamy peace of Northlands for ever. But I have been a pet for such a long time—for years, and I've shown myself to be such a bad pet—biting the hand that fed me."

I bade her not talk foolishly. She moved her small shoulder.

"It's true. While the three of you—you and Barbara and Jaffery—were doing for me what has never been done for another human being, I was all the time snarling and snapping. I can't make out how you can bear the sight of me." She clenched her hands and straightened her arms down tense. "The thought of it scorches me," she cried suddenly.

"Whatever you did, dear," said I, "was so natural; and we understood it all. How could we blame you?"

We had, in fact, blamed her on many occasions, not being as gods to whom human hearts are open books; but this was not the occasion on which to tell her so. I don't like the devil being called the father of lies. I am convinced that the discoverer of mendacity was a warm-hearted philanthropist, who has never received due credit, and that the devil having seized hold of his discovery perverted it to his own diabolical uses. It is the sort of plagiaristic thing that devils, whether they promote ancient Gehennas or modern companies, have been doing since the world began.

"That doesn't make it any the easier to me," said Doria. "The horrible things I said and did—the ghastliness of it—"

"My dear girl," I interrupted, as kindly as I could. "Don't let this mere fringe of tragedy worry you."

She laughed shrilly, with a set, white face; which is the most unmirthful kind of laugh you can imagine.

"Don't you know that it's the fringe that is the maddening irritation? The big central thing numbs and stupefies, when it doesn't kill. And for some reason"—she threw out her little gloved hands—"the big thing hasn't killed me—it has paralysed me. The springs of feeling"—she clutched her bosom—"are dried up. My heart is withered and dead. I can't explain. For all the dead things I'm not responsible. I've gone through Hell the last two or three weeks and they've been burned up altogether. But what hasn't been burned up is the fringe, as you call it. That's only red-hot. It scorches me, and I can't sleep for the torture of it. . . ." She stopped, and fronting me laid an appealing touch on my arm. "Oh, Hilary, forgive me. I didn't mean to go on in this wild way. I thought I had a better hold on myself."

"I don't see," said I, "why you shouldn't unburden your heart to one who has proved himself to be a friend not only of yours, but of Adrian."

She released me, and with a wide gesture, swayed across the gravel path. I stepped to her side and mechanically we walked on, a few paces, before either of us spoke.

"I have told you," she said at last. "I have no heart to unburden. There never was an Adrian."

"There was indeed," said I, warmly.

"Yours. Not mine."

"Have you no forgiveness for him, then?" I asked earnestly.

She halted again and looked at me and at the back of her great eyes gleamed black ice.

"No," she said.

I went straight to bed-rock.

"He was the father of your dead child," said I.

Her small frame heaved and she looked away from me down the drive. "I can only thank God that the child didn't live."

Barbara had told me something of the fear in which she seemed to hold Adrian's memory. But I had not in the least realised it till now when I heard the profession from her own lips. In fact, I know that she had never yet spoken to Barbara with such passionate directness.

"You oughtn't to say such a thing, Doria," I said sternly.

"I am as God made me."

"Adrian loved you. He sinned for your sake—in order to get you."

She dismissed the argument with a gesture.

"You must have pity on him," I insisted, "for the unspeakable torment of those months of barrenness, of abortive attempts at creation."

She was silent for a moment. Having reached the front gates we turned and began to walk up the drive. Then she said:

"Yes, I do pity him. It's enough to tear one's brain out,—his when he was alive—and mine now. The thought of it will freeze my soul for all eternity. I can't tell you what I feel." She cast out her hands imploringly to the autumn fields. "I pity him as I would pity some one remote from me—a criminal whom I might have seen done to death by awful tortures. It's a matter of the brain, not of the heart. No. I have all the understanding. But I can't find the pardon."

"That will come," said I.

"In the next world, perhaps, not in this."

Her tone of finality forbade argument. Besides what was there to argue about? She had said: "There never was an Adrian." From her point of view, she was mercilessly right.

"It's horrible to think," she went on after a pause, "that all this time I've been living, first on stolen property and now on charity—Jaffery's charity—and he hasn't even had a word of thanks. Quite the contrary." Again she laughed the shrill, dead laugh. "You see, I must go home—to my father's—I'm strong enough now—and start my life, such as it is, all over again. I can't touch another penny of the Wittekind money. Castleton's people and Jaffery must be paid."

"Tom Castleton," I said, "was alone in the world, and Jaffery's not the man to take back a free gift beautifully given. If you don't like to keep the money—I appreciate your feelings—you can devote it to philanthropic purposes."

"Yes, I might do that," she agreed. "But is this fraud—this false reputation—to go on forever?"

"I'm afraid it must," said I. "Nobody would be benefited by throwing such a bombshell of scandal into society. If anybody living were suffering from wrong it might be different. But there's no reason to blacken unnecessarily the name you bear."

"Then you really think I should be justified in keeping the secret?" she asked anxiously.

"I think it would be outrageous of you to do anything else," said I.

"That eases my mind. If it were essential for me to make things public, I would do it. I'm not a coward. But I should die of the disgrace."

"To poor Adrian," said I.

She flashed a quick, defiant glance.

"To me."

"To Adrian," I insisted, smitten with a queer inspiration. "He sinned—the unpardonable sin, if you like. But he expiated it. He's expiating it now. And you love him. And it's for his sake, not yours, that you shrink from public disgrace. You were so irrevocably wrapped up in him"—I pursued my advantage—"that you feel yourself a partner in his guilt. Which means that you love him still."

She raised a stark, terror-stricken face. I touched her shoulder. Then, all of a sudden, she collapsed, and broke into an agony of sobs and tears. I drew her to a desolate rustic bench and put my arm round her and let her sob herself out.

After that we did not speak of Adrian.



CHAPTER XXIV

At last news came from Havre of the end of the preposterous voyage.

"Crossing to-night. Coming straight to you. Send car to meet us Reading. Local trains beastly. Both fit as elephants. Love to all.

"JAFFERY."

Such was the telegram. I wired to Southampton acquiescence in his proposal. It was far more sensible to come direct to Reading than to make a detour through London. Rooms were got ready. In the one destined for Liosha, we had already stowed the cargo of trunks which the Great Swiftness had delivered in the nick of time. The next day I took the car to Reading and waited for the train.

From the far end of it I saw two familiar figures descend, and a moment afterwards the station resounded with a familiar roar.

"Hullo! hullo! hullo!"

Jaffery, red-bearded, grinning, perhaps a bit mightier, hairier, redder than ever, his great hands uplifted, rushed at me and shook me in his lunatic way, so that train, passengers, porters and Liosha all rocked and reeled before my eyes. He let me go, and, before I could recover, Liosha threw her arms round my neck and kissed me. A porter who picked up my hat restored me to mental equipoise. Then I looked at them, and anything more splendid in humanity than that simple, happy pair of gigantic children I have never seen in my life. I, too, felt the laughter of happiness swell in my heart, for their gladness at the sight of me was so true, so unaffected, and I wrung their hands and laughed aloud foolishly. It is good to be loved, especially when you've done nothing particular to deserve it. And in their primitive way these two loved me.

"Isn't she fit?" roared Jaffery.

"Magnificent," said I.

She was. The thick tan of exposure to wind and sun gave her a gipsy swarthiness beneath which glowed the rich colour of health. When I had parted from her at Havre there had been just a thread of soft increase in her generous figure; but now all superfluous flesh had hardened down into muscle, and the superb lines proclaimed her splendour. And there seemed to be more authority in her radiant face and a new masterfulness and a quicker intelligence in her brown eyes. I noticed that it was she who first broke away from the clamour of greeting and gave directions as to the transport of their "dunnage." Jaffery followed her with the tail of his eye; then turned to me with a bass chuckle.